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So I pretty much just abandoned my garden for two weeks to fend for itself as I went off to the Permaculture Design Course and certification at OAEC. The course opening was unexpected, forcing me to throw some immature tomato and basil starts into the ground without much hope of their survival. The weather had been heating up and I returned to find much of what I expected, dried and cracking ground in some places (those without mulch or plant cover–go figure!), and most of the starts had indeed died or were eaten. However, out of about ten starts two tomatos remained. I’m pretty positive that those two will go on to do wonderful things because they have proved themselves to be tough characters: resistant to pests and able to handle an early planting. They are great candidates for seed saving.
One of the nice surprises was to find my garden flourishing in most other aspects. I am quite impressed by this wonderful show from my rapini (broccoli raab) plant. It has been going strong like this now for over a month. I’m sure if I keep cutting it back it will continue to flower well into early summer. The funny thing about the rapini is that it is way too bitter for my taste, but I kept it around anyways because I didn’t have anything planned for the area it is in and I enjoyed the first small blooms that it put out. Now I’m quite glad that I chose to let aesthetic win out over functional because it is a blast of color in a garden that is looking kind of drab right now. It requires no care and is providing function beyond the food that I would have liked to enjoy: pollinators have been visiting it, it is providing food for the soil food web and if I wanted to, I could also take advantage of its shade and cover to protect sensitive starts.
While I will still probably do a fair amount of coddling for certain plants, I have been leaning more towards the approach that I see patterned in the natural world. May the best plant win. While this might mean the loss of a lot of plants up front, ultimately I will have a garden that requires significantly less work yet yields roughly the same amount of food. This sounds so obvious when typing it, yet if you read pretty much any how-to-grow guide for vegetables, the coddle effect is in full force: fertilize, weed, pest manage, blah blah blah. This is where burnt-out gardeners and farmers are created, as they seek to serve plants that really probably shouldn’t be alive (did I just say that?). For me, I hope it becomes more of a dialogue as I seek to guide my garden towards being able to handle the semi-arid realities of my region. There will always be a few choice plants that I coddle because I love, but when droughts and water rations threaten, how nice it would be to sit back with the assurance that I will probably still have food because I have plants that survive through a broad range of conditions.
Your approach seems sound. I read once someone saying that she hardly ever watered her garden and so that when drought and water rationing came, her plants survived – because they had deep roots and were used to scarce water – whilst her neighbour’s all died from the lack. I’ve also learned the hard way that there is no point trying to cultivate a plant that just isn’t suited to the conditions you’ve got.
Great blog btw!
Thanks! A short term focus can lead to long term hardship. I think one of the traps we can fall into is the idea of bigger (or more) is better. This leads us down a path to increased maintenance and hand holding. When something like water shortages strike the plants we have been cultivating for maximum yield perish (a yield of zero), while someone satisfied with less yield for more hardiness will have a harvest!