The Vegetable Garden

I'd like to pretend that gardening is my attempt to get off-grid. It is, I guess, in its own way, but then I'm writing this blogpost on the interweb. So growing a few vegetables isn't really likely to diminish my dirty great ecological footprint by a whole lot. (We do, however, have solar panels which run about 90% of our hot water during the summer months, and probably 70% in the winter, so I'm maybe allowed a little leeway, here).

But, really, gardening is about trying to eat organic without paying eye-watering prices and supporting the evil capitalist overlords of the likes of Whole Foods (and I'm not being hyperbolic: Whole Foods is a truly evil company). And, even more than this, it's about getting my hands dirty, literally, and spending an hour or two a day outside in the sun instead of thinking and writing about neoliberal capitalism in the dark confines of my home office, which is infuriatingly located above the inane clatter and chatter of the kitchen.

It's a fair-sized patch. We have an acre of land in total, though most of that is wooded (her ladyship would like to reclaim some of the forest, but that would mean interminable sprees of summer mowing for me unless we covered it in asphalt, which would kind of defeat the purpose). The vegetable patch is a fenced-in area on the southern end of the house. It's about 600 sq.ft. To put that in perspective, it's about 0.01 - one measly hundredth - of an acre but, with intensive cultivation, the glorious North Cackalacky climate means it could feasibly produce about 2/3 of the vegetables for two people for a year (yes, really).

Here it is from the sky, courtesy of Daft Logic's Google Maps Area Calculator thingy:

A bird's eye view. Well, maybe a hawk's eye view, since average birds probably don't fly that high.

The first year we were here, I attempted to cultivate a few plants in a few raised beds. Perhaps "cultivate" isn't the word. "Unassiduously grow" is probably more accurately descriptive. Actually, "grow" is also wrong; "not kill" would be a better choice. I unassiduosly attempted to not kill a few plants in a few raised beds is a fairer statement of the facts. Anyway. We were reasonably successful with tomatoes, and the almighty crop of (now-dried) chilli peppers remain sporadically used in our kitchen to this day. We had a few cucumber plants, though the zucchini (or courgette) plants were mercilessly devoured by a whole army of fanatical squash bugs despite my best (and at times tearful, frustrated and genocidal) efforts. Annihilating an entire legion of squash bugs was one thing. But I hadn't banked on the ferocity of the weeds - all kinds of grasses, tenacious knots of obsessively spreading clover, Venus Fly-Traps etc.- all of which were seemingly undaunted by a foot of topsoil. I hadn't lined the beds underneath with anything, and so up they came. This is, of course, something of the beauty of living in a rural area. Deers meander. Trains hoot. Coyotes howl. Things grow. 

In contrast, I tried "urban farming" when we lived in our previous place. Not even weeds would thrive, though this probably had something to do with the assortment of car batteries, broken glass, lead pipe offcuts and rejected cement blocks buried less-than-surreptitiously in the wasteland which misconstituted a garden. Having to use a jackhammer and dynamite merely to break the ground kind of outweighed the prospective benefits of a few radishes, especially when pulling them up would require dusting off the jackhammer again. I did, however, manage to get a few cucumbers growing on trellises, in a vegetable bed which some poor bastard and probably several generations of his descendants had hacked out next to the house on top of the foundations. I even grew a melon vine on the trellis, until my cousin tactfully pointed out that if I successfully grew vertical melons, then all bets on Newton's Laws of Gravity would be off.

Last year, I couldn't be bothered with it all, for various reasons including being not really bothered with anything, such as shaving or getting out of bed, let alone the futile escapade of scything through dense undergrowth, only for it grow back by the time I'd finished (which, in my case, was essentially the same as shaving). So I left it. And it turned back into a sub-tropical jungle in one season, which is not entirely surprising since we live in a rural, sub-tropical jungle.

So, this year, I'm changing tack. I'm still not using Round-Up to nuke the weeds (ineffectively) and make the executives of Monsanto or their devil-spawn even more wealthy than they already should be. I also have issues about where all that shit goes. If it's not into my vegetables - "organically broken down", I think they bill it as - then it's got to go somewhere, which is probably the stream that runs round the back of my vegetable garden. I wrestle with the morality of using Sevin dust (to combat the teeming hordes of squash bugs and their allies) in more complex ways. Everyone round here swears by it, but it's banned in the UK and parts of the EU, and I can't decide if either of those are good or bad things. It is, however, produced by an off-shoot of Union Carbide - of the Bhopal chemical disaster infamy - and, so far, this has been the tipping point that has prevented me from flinging it with abandon at insect populations. (Clearly, even gardening is not very effective at preventing me from thinking about neoliberal capitalism).

Having spent the afternoon clearing the whole plot of weeds by hand and sticking the lot on a bonfire  (more pics to follow), I'm kind of poised to be ahead of the game (that said, we start planting February 1st down here, in contrast to those of you in more northern climes). This year, I'm going with ... black plastic sheeting. I can lay it over the whole of the garden, having tilled in the several billion leaves which have fallen from the ever-enthusiastic Japanese magnolia in the front yard, which seem to be genetically-programmed to see the whole point of its existence as engulfing my whole roof, and eventually tearing it off.  I'll also add in some composted, degraded cowshit, which is freely available in the newsletters from the local branch of the Republican Party. Black plastic isn't the prettiest, though it can be hidden underneath straw (which also has the advantage of stopping the soil actually cooking whatever vegetables are attempting to grow in it). But the weeds will have No Fucking Chance Whatsoever, since you only cut holes in it big enough to stick your plants in, and then puncture it a few times where the rainwater puddles (not good for plants, though great for families of mosquitoes). At this point, with the weeds firmly established, there isn't much of an option outside of napalm or Agent Orange, as used as weedkilling and genocidal techniques in the Vietnam War. These are not only ecologically-toxic, but are also are inflected by the spread of neoliberal capitalism through American Imperialism. (Jesus. I'm at it again).

The problem, however, is this: plastic doesn't bio-degrade. Nothing on earth can digest plastic. I've recently re-started the compost pile, in which microbes digest the vegetable scraps from our kitchen (which, when you start collecting them for compost, adds up to an astonishing amount). But plastic sticks around. Practically forever. It's a bit like nuclear waste. We have no idea how to deal with it other than to stick it in the ground, what kind of effect it has on the local ecology (other than making fish become asexual and causing everything to glow), or even if we'll remember to tell our great-grandchildren where the fuck we decided to put it. Anyone with a great-grandparent (or, in my wife's case, a spouse) that cannot remember for the life of them where they left the car keys, will appreciate that it's the latter point that is perhaps the most worrying.

***I'm going to update this post fairly regularly as things go on, with pictures and the like, so check back. Enter your email in the "subscribe" box at the top left if you'd like to be notified of my tears, triumphs and tribulations in the world of gardening***