Garden with Moxie
Thursday, July 17th, 2008I 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?
