Victory Gardens
My father had a huge garden every year, starting during World War II. At first they were very large, and plowed by a hired tractor. Our rural/suburban home was surrounded by open fields. As houses filled in after the war’s end, we moved to a home with a large yard where he continued to garden till the last year of his life.
We rented homes for years after marriage, and the first one with sufficient land was in central Pennsylvania. A guy drove by with a tractor and offered to plow us a garden. He charged 50 cents (very low income area) but we gave him $1. We threw in some seeds and waited for vegetables to grow….but they didn’t.
We moved to Mill Valley and I did some serious study about gardening and ended up having a fine garden and growing many types of vegetables. Our move to Sonoma County was prompted by the lure of more land and especially more sun for agriculture. While Mrs. side pocket turned the property into a successful flower farm, we also maintained a large deer-fenced vegetable garden and grew much of our own food for decades.
During this quarantine we have stopped at our wonderful Imwalle Garden nursery twice to buy some bedding plants and found it jammed, with no parking. Everyone was masked, and folks were buying huge quantities of bedding plants, every variety. In a recent article I noticed that despite the commercial slowdown, nursery business is up 125%. The newspapers have been filled with articles advising folks to start gardens and giving gardening advice. It’s not as easy as it looks but one improves with experience and I think in the long run this whole movement is a positive thing.
Here’s how popular the movement is. I googled “gardening in time of quarantine” and google returned 76,900,000 results in only 0.34 seconds. That’s a lot!
The Chronicle this morning advises starting with these “easy” crops: lettuce, green onions, kale, broccoli, squash, peas, bush beans, tomatoes. Don’t plant cilantro or kale, because:
Many of my garden photos disappeared when the image library faced the legal action, but here’s what an onion bed looks like just before harvest. When the first few stalks dry out and lean over you smush them all over and let them dry out for a few days before harvesting them.
Many of you have gardened for years. Has the pandemic changed the way you garden? Have you increased the vegetable portion of your garden? What are your gardening challenges in your area? Mine were gophers, and there are none at the condo so we can grew a few things, but the soil is questionable.