Moxie Gardener

A brand new year and a fresh start in the garden.

It’s a new year and a chance for a new start in the garden.  Here are a few areas I hope to write about in 2009:

• This year I plan to return to intensive gardening. I use the square foot method, with a slight modification.  I’ll be sharing my successes and failures, along with a few things I’ve learned gardening with this method in the past.
• Fundamental to success in intensive gardening is improving your soil.  After last year’s disappointing yields, my garden soil is in dire need of improvement.  My goal is to improve the soil in my garden beds at little or no cost.
• One of my existing garden beds will be expanded and the other, primarily a flower garden with a few herbs thrown in, will get an entirely new planting scheme.  I also plan to add a narrow bed along the fence to hide the trash cans with a couple of rows of sunflowers.
• I gave up my seed starting shelves in a household move a couple of years ago.  Now that I have more room, I plan to purchase the components and put together another one.  I’ll start more of my own seeds, rather than purchase bedding plants.
• I’ll keep you updated on my progress at obtaining free or low cost seeds through seed savers exchanges.  Gardeners are so generous you can oftentimes get seeds for just a self-addressed, stamped envelope.
• I’m curious about the validity of planting and harvesting according to the phases of the moon.  I’ll be experimenting with this during the growing season.
• If I can find an available community garden plot, I plan to chronicle my experiences, successes, and failures while gardening away from home.
• Also on the agenda for 2009 is to review gardening sites, tools, catalogs, and miscellaneous gardening “stuff.”
• Finally, I’ll continue to spotlight individual plants in short, easy-to-read articles.  These articles are intended to be a general description of the plant or vegetable.  I’ll toss in a little background or trivia, along with general growing requirements for quick reference or to refresh your memory.

Most of all I want to share my experiences trying to grow as much as possible in my modest garden beds.  It does take effort, but the rewards are delicious.

Life is good in a garden.

It’s high summer and wow is it hot!  Time to sit and wait, watch the garden grow, and pick, pick, pick.

In my garden, summer is my laziest time.  After a hectic spring, I can relax and enjoy the beauty.

Everything is mulched so I don’t have to weed.  Water, fertilize, and pick.  That’s what I do in summer.

Ok.  I do other things.  I usually get around to organizing my seeds.  I make sure all the envelopes are sealed and file them by planting season.  Salad and other greens, tomatoes and peppers get their own categories because I grow so many varieties of each.

I try to start some salad greens and cole crops in flats for planting out in mid to late August.  If I’m super busy with other things I’ll keep them inside under lights.  If I grow them on outside, even in the shade, they need water daily, sometimes twice.  Made that mistake before.

One of my favorite garden tools is a sharp pair of scissors.  I use them to dead head flowers, pick beans, and cut the roots off salad greens as I pick them—less dirt makes the greens easier to wash.  While you’re dead heading, don’t forget to use the scissors to cut bouquets of flowers for every room.

Cut your herbs back before they flower and dry for winter use.  They’ll have more flavor because they contain more essential oil before they flower.  Tie in bunches and hang upside down until crunchy.  Strip the leaves from the stems but don’t crush them until you use them in your recipes.  I couldn’t bear to throw away any part of my herbs and I’ve found that the stems add subtle flavor to soups and stews.  Just make sure to fish them out before serving.

Now is the time to dig out the tomato and zucchini recipes collected since last summer.  What better time to experiment with these vegetables than when there are so many of them?

I love, Love, LOVE my garden.  I could talk about it endlessly and gaze upon it for hours.  Every morning I inspect the plants, mentally comparing their size to the night before.  In spring I even use a ruler to measure their overnight growth.  (By midsummer their growth is self-evident.)

I am starting this blog to share my enthusiasm for gardening and to learn from my visitors.

Why “moxie?”  Webster’s Dictionary defines moxie as “energy, pep, knowledge, enthusiasm, courage, and determination.”  These six words encompass my gardening philosophy.

I’ll get back to energy and pep in a moment.

Knowledge refers to the ability to understand your plant’s needs.  Meeting those needs gives you a return on your investment a thousandfold, be it in bloom or in produce.

Enthusiasm is what we all have for gardening or we wouldn’t be here on this blog.

Courage means we aren’t afraid to take a risk.  We’ll plant that untried specimen, try out that just-discovered pest deterrent, or eat that unfamiliar vegetable we grew because we couldn’t resist planting it.

Determination is what makes us, for example, cover up the pole beans with buckets every night and uncover them every morning for a month until they grew enough to climb the poles, out of reach of the rabbit that insisted on eating them.  Sure, I could have put up a fence or covered them with fancy row covers, but that just wasn’t in the budget this year.  My beans will come later than usual, but my determination rescued them from not bearing at all.

Energy and pep are part of the dictionary’s definition of moxie and truly belong in my philosophy of gardening.  If we are to succeed in bringing forth a crop we must expend energy to achieve that.  However, my energy is expended primarily in spring preparing and improving the soil and applying an effective mulch.  This gives the plants a rich fertile soil in which to grow, retains moisture and checks the growth of weeds.  Expend energy in spring and indulge in laziness all summer!

As for pep, it is defined, among other things, as initiative.  What gardener lacks that?