Big Plans for Small Spaces

One of the main problems I’ve had to solve, as a suburban gardener with limited space, time, and energy, is where to put all the plants I want to grow. Fortunately, I do have a flowerbed about 30 feet long and 3 feet wide, and I’m able to relegate some of the more decorative or hard-to-place plants to a spot among the perennials. But my main vegetable garden is small, and I want to get as much edible growth as possible out of my 100-foot-square raised bed.

So I’ve embraced the notions of interplanting and succession planting with the fervor of a religious revivalist. To begin the season, I’ve planted the entire middle portion of the garden with green, leafy vegetables—spinach and butterhead lettuce—and radishes. In between the rows, I’ve placed eight good-sized rocks to indicate where the tomatoes will be planted later in the season. This is a new thing for me, and there’s no telling how well it will work.

The radish seedlings came up first, just a few days ago. These were meant to be a decoy plant, so that any insect that had an interest in spinach or lettuce would instead eat the radish plants, which marauding bugs are said to prefer. Nothing has eaten any of the seedlings yet, and I have been thinning out some of the extras. The spinach and lettuce have since made their appearance between the radish rows. The seedlings appear robust. I am anxiously awaiting the appearance of the first pair of true leaves on each of them. Only then will I feel confident that some of these plants will make it to harvest.

On the southeastern edge of the garden, I have planted a narrower bed of Swiss chard and Walla Walla onions. I love the idea of growing big, sweet onions, but so far, there’s been no onion action. The Swiss chard, meanwhile, has emerged vigorously, as one would expect from a planting of big, strong-looking, cube-shaped seeds. I have high hopes for the Swiss chard. It’s supposed to do quite well in the summer heat. In Virginia, that’s a big plus. If it grows to the height I’ve seen in the grocery stores—some two and a half feet of strong-ribbed, tightly bunched vertical leaves—I will feel that I have brought something worthwhile to the world.

On the opposite edge, I’ve raised the trellis I mentioned before. To one side of my bamboo frame, I attached a length of plastic netting with twist ties. It was the same netting that I used last year in a not entirely successful attempt to keep the birds off my blueberry bushes. Beneath this netting, I’ve planted a row of closely-spaced snow peas, an early crop that should be out of the way by midsummer. On the other side of the trellis, the first pole bean seedling is poking its curved, yellow-green stem out of the mud.

In between, I’ve hilled up the dirt to accommodate one buttercup squash plant at each end of the row, with three cucumber hills taking up the middle. I poked a nasturtium seed into the base of each hill, because nasturtiums are supposed to repel squash bugs, which were the bane of my existence last year. The squash, cucumbers, and nasturtiums have not yet germinated, though I’ve kept a close watch on the hills.

Indoors, my peppers, tomatoes, and eggplants are still quite small, and the eggplants have only now put out their third leaves. These I will have to transplant into larger containers—Dixie cups, most likely, since I have nothing better, and since one must use these paper cups for something, after stumbling over them in the pantry closet for so many years. Between the tomato plants, I may plant a few peppers, but I think most of the peppers and eggplants will go into the flowerbed, just as they did last year. Peppers, in particular, are attractive plants, with their gleaming, pointed leaves, white flowers, and pendulous fruit.

Between the tomatoes, after the greens are done, I will plant two kinds of basil: plain basil and cinnamon basil. Although I’ve read that planting basil near tomatoes will improve their flavor, I’m not sure I believe those assertions. After all, any homegrown tomato is a huge improvement over the supermarket variety, and further enhancements in flavor would be extremely hard to measure. Still, I’ll give it a try. I like basil and I like tomatoes. The gardener’s foremost directive should be to plant what she likes. The only trouble is figuring out where to put it and making the plan work out.

Seedlings

The vegetable and flower seeds started appearing in February, arrayed on tall racks at Lowe’s and Target. Each packet showed off a picture of the ideal specimen of its variety, a picture that practically screamed, “Plant me now!”

It’s hard for a gardener to resist that siren song. Last year, I heard it clearly and felt I was getting a late start when I planted my seeds indoors in March. It was a choice I ended up regretting. Everything looked perfect at first. The tomato seedlings sprang up vigorously, the thyme ran riot, and the basil—ah, the basil!—grew into a verdant mass of scented leaves. But outside the house, the cold winds howled all through April.

By the time I was ready to transplant my tomato seedlings into the garden, they were tall, skinny, spindly things. I planted them deeply, knowing that tomato stems planted underground will produce roots, but the plants still poked too far above the soil. The next harsh wind weakened the plants. I kept the peppers, eggplant, and cucurbits (cucumbers, melons, and squash) inside for several more weeks, until the weather turned milder, and they tangled themselves into a jungle on the dining room table.

This year, I was determined to do things differently. I started buying the seeds early, but I stored them away. My next-door neighbor, The Man with the Perfect Lawn, started his seeds in late March. I decided to start mine in mid-April. When the time came, however, I was immersed in other activities, too busy to dibble in seed starter. I planted my seeds just last week—too late, perhaps, to get much of a head start on the growing season, but certainly not too early.

The tomatoes started coming up a few days ago, starting with the Early Girl tomato seeds I bought last year. Yesterday, the first eggplant seed sprouted. The Anaheim and Aurora peppers haven’t yet reared up any vestige of stem or leaf.

Each time a seed sends out its first stem into the sunlight, I wonder at how such a large mass of life can emerge so quickly from something so small. Some of the tomato seeds I planted—the seeds of tiny currant tomatoes—were no larger than a grain of sand, yet their seedlings are already one inch high. Still, after the first leaves have emerged, the seed’s most important job is done. It has given the plant embryo enough nutrition to meet the sunlight and send out roots to photosynthesize and absorb moisture on its own.

Underestimate the seedling’s powers of growth, and you might end up, as I did last spring, with a table full of young plants straining to break free from their peat pots.

Getting Dirty

When the world is covered with an impermeable layer of icy snow (with a crust so thick that a large man can stand on it without breaking through), it is easy for the gardener to anticipate the pleasures that springtime will bring. I spent much of my free time, in the last months, leafing through lush catalogs and gardening manuals, buying seed packets, and imagining a future full of possibilities, of beans, peppers, radishes, eggplant, and the incomparable, ripe, juicy, acidulous tomatoes of summer.

Sooner or later, though, every dreamer has to confront reality. My own reality has taken on a distinctly earthy tinge, in the form of a veritable mountain of dirt. The garden may aspire toward heaven, but it is anchored in the ground-up rubble and detritus of the mortal world. Anyone who wants to eke an edible harvest from this soil must ensure that it will provide the nutrients the plants will need to fuel their growth.

Therein lies my problem. In my 10-by-10-foot plot, I had to contend with a substance that was soil-like in appearance, but which was actually compounded of ground-up wood. The landscaper who created the garden last year dumped in wood mulch rather than soil or compost. I began to realize what was wrong after many of my spring seedlings began to turn yellow and wilt, but by then it was too late to start over. I dug some soil into the roots, sprinkled slow-release synthetic fertilizers, and watered the plants with liquid fertilizer. By the end of the growing season, I had harvested a few dozen tomatoes, perhaps half a dozen cucumbers, and a scattering of bush beans.

This year, I was determined not to make the same mistakes. I borrowed a capacious wheelbarrow from my neighbor, and transferred load after load of the bad garden soil to the flowerbeds, where it would do less harm. My body is solidly built, but that sort of work is much like snow-shoveling: it hurts all the more because it uses muscles that aren’t regularly used in any other normal activity. I ached for days after the first attempt to empty the garden.

Another landscaper filled the void with one and a half cubic yards of compost that she claimed would grow anything. “I slipped when I was standing in the truck, and told my workers, ‘I just fell down the shitpile!’” the landscaper said, chuckling. The workers piled the dirt higher than the edges of the raised garden box, unintentionally creating another day’s work for me: the extra soil would again have to be transferred to one of the flowerbeds. If the landscaper was right about the soil’s fertility, the dried blood and bone meal I bought as organic sources of nitrogen and phosphorus will also be dumped among the flowers.

But before I plant my spring peas, I will use my cheap consumer testing kits to make sure there are at least some nutrients in the soil at the start. To those who claim that gardening is a form of therapy, I say, “Bah!”

Gardening is all about grubbing in the dirt, killing bugs, and smashing the guts out of tomato-eating caterpillars. It’s not a gentle hobby; it’s a blood sport and an exhausting occupation, a struggle against the vicissitudes of nature and a competition with every other living thing that eats vegetables (which includes most of the animal world, except the carnivores). Its rewards are scant compensation for the effort involved.

Success in the garden is no wondrous miracle of gentle growth; it is an achievement won through intense physical labor and mental calculation. Even on a small scale, a garden puts grit behind your fingernails and a sunburn on your neck.

If you want therapy, buy a scented candle instead.