Dreaming of a Spring Garden

Spring Vegetable Garden: Dream Big, but Start Small

Ahhh! Spring is here at last! It's time to shake ourselves out of hibernation mode and start digging in the dirt.

As with every year, I have a lofty aspiration of creating the vegetable garden that will surpass all others. This is a hopeful season, after all. In order to keep this goal realistic and manageable, I have created a path to get the garden to where I want it to be this year.

1. Test the garden soil: done. The garden soil's N-P-K ranges have graduated from depleted to deficient. We're making progress here!

2. Add soil amendments to the garden soil: in progress. Recent heavy rains are delaying this chore a bit, but we do need the rain so no complaints here. This year I'm adding blood meal (for nitrogen), bone meal (for phosphorus), and numerous, about a hundred or so,  Nori sushi roll wrappers, cut up (for potash), as well as good ol' reliable compost.

3. Plant snow peas, carrots, and Swiss chard (the rainbow variety) in the container garden area: mission accomplished.

4. Plan the main garden with an app: done. For a list of great gardening apps, you can't go wrong with Gardenista's "The Top Ten Gardening Apps You Need Now." 

5. Start tomato, cucumber, and squash seeds: partially complete. Some of the seedlings didn't make it, so I'll try again this weekend. I also want to start some pepper seeds--both hot and sweet varieties--at this time. One thing I really want to do is to start at least 90% of my plants from seed myself,  rather than rely on bought transplants.

6. Feed and mulch the blueberry planter box: done. I used pine bark mulch since the blueberry bushes are acid-loving plants.

7. Feed and mulch the strawberry plants: in progress.

8. Transplant the four citrus trees--Meyer lemon, key lime, grapefruit, and kumquat: mission accomplished. The trees are looking happy.

9. Transplant tomato, cucumber, squash, and pepper plants: in about a month to six weeks' time.

10. Keep the compost pile going: this is a continuous project.

11. Plant green beans, wax beans, collard greens, and basil: in a few weeks.

12. Mulch the main garden: in about six to eight weeks' time. This will cut down the weeding headaches tremendously.

13. Put a comfortable lawn chair near the garden area in order to relax and bask in the garden: soon, very soon.

Here's to making garden fantasies a reality! Happy Gardening!

By Spedona (Spedona) (Cliché personnel - own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY-SA 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

This is close to how I envision my garden in the making.

Garden of My Dreams?

Ultimate Garden? Dream On! 

Each year, at the end of the academic year in late spring, I, like many gardeners, go through the same mental process. We think that this year is going to be different, that our garden will be bigger and better, with more space devoted to what we euphemistically call a hobby. Our garden dreams may very well end up looking like this:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pieskowa_Ska%C5%82a_ogr%C3%B3d_zamkowy.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Pieskowa_Ska%C5%82a_ogr%C3%B3d_zamkowy.jpg 

Or this:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hever_Castle_rose_garden_with_fountain.JPG#mediaviewer/File:Hever_Castle_rose_garden_with_fountain.JPG

Or even this:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Buenos_Aires_Entrada_al_Jardin_Botanico_Carlos_Thays.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Buenos_Aires_Entrada_al_Jardin_Botanico_Carlos_Thays.jpg

However, a common mistake is to overestimate the time and energy involved in creating and maintaining a garden. Are watering needs being met? Is enough time being devoted each week to everyone's least favorite task, weeding (yes, according to Ella Wheeler Wilcox, "A weed is but an unloved flower," but most gardeners choose to shower love elsewhere)? Is enough energy being spent in dissuading pests from your precious plants? Are compost and/or fertilizer needs being met? If plants need to be pruned or staked, is enough time and energy being devoted to these tasks? Finally, will your schedule allow time to simply be in the garden, to sit, relax, and/or meditate in the positive space you have created?

 If the answer to any of these questions is no, then it is time to scale back that dream a bit. This is not settling for "second best": it is being realistic. It is far more gratifying to start small and expand that garden as time and energy permit, throughout the growing season, than to try to keep up with a grandiose gardening plan that will leave you burned out and feeling frustrated. Trust me on this one.

Gardening is supposed to be a fun, emotionally-rewarding pastime, not a drudge or a chore; that said, anyone who wishes to garden needs to expect to put time and sweat into any gardening aspirations. According to Liberty Hyde Bailey, co-founder of the American Society for Horticultural Science, "A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them."

. And starting small and then building up the garden gradually allows the gardener's imagination to flow more freely, according to Mrs. C. W. Earle, in Pot-Pourri from an Surrey Garden, 1897: "Half the interest of a garden is the constant exercise of the imagination."