My Green Thumb

Robert McKeon Aloe
Overthinking Life
Published in
4 min readDec 28, 2018

My paternal grandfather and his father and many generations back were farmers. My grandfather became a mechanical engineer, and he worked on the very Ford tractors he bought to farm his fields until he retired. My father learned how to farm, but ultimately became a nuclear engineer. I never learned how to farm, but I always loved tractors.

When I bought a house, I wanted to grow a garden. I liked fresh tomatoes and herbs, so I started digging. My yard was most bad dirt over clay, so I dug the top six inches of a 10 by 10 foot area. Then I decided some engineering would be good. I lined the outer edge with bricks going down so that rodents couldn’t dig their way in (the clay beneath acted as a barrier as well). I bought 2 yards of mushroom manure and 2 yards of dirt to fill it in. I fenced in the garden with plastic mesh and even made a gate with a latch. I later added chicken wire after a rabbit twice ate through the plastic to feast on some delicious fresh treats.

Then I planted. The first year, I had mostly small tomatoes, and the blight was bad. But I was captivated. The next year, I decided if a 100 square feet is cool, 150 is better. I also engineered more by planning out stakes and arrangement for more tomato plants, mostly for sauce. I also discovered how to deal with blight effectively. Tomato plants will keep growing, and if trimmed, they can outgrow the blight. So I trimmed twice a week all the leaves with blight (in some cases the bottom half of the plant). It looked like I was killing the plants, but they shot up 6 or 7 feet tall on my stakes plus a later addition of a wood frame on top to handle the weight.

Every time I would go out into the garden, my hands would acquire a few layers of dark green and dirt. It was therapeutic because I couldn’t focus on anything else out there. I would have to wash my hands to do anything else, and my thoughts were focused on the plants. I ended up with 150 lbs of tomatoes that year. The next year, the garden looked like a tomato forest with 60 or more plants leaving two bushels of tomatoes.

I also had a few fig trees, and I watered them twice a day. Unfortunately, Pennsylvania weather is not the best for figs, and I only got a few from them. I initially thought I wanted the fruit, but I had actually fallen in love with the process. Watching something grow everyday, seeing how water or fertilizer or some leaf trimming improved a plant’s well-being, and getting some sunshine were irresistible. So much of gardening/farming is out of your control which helped re-enforce a “do your best and let go of the results” attitude change, a kind of meditation. I was freshly reminded of what I could do to improve my character in small, consistent ways on a daily basis.

However, I moved out to California in 2014, and my garden here is quite smaller. I’m starting some tomatoes from seed again; we shall see how we grow.

--

--

Overthinking Life
Overthinking Life

Published in Overthinking Life

Thinking too much on Philosophy, Math, Science, Politics, Work, and Life

Robert McKeon Aloe
Robert McKeon Aloe

Written by Robert McKeon Aloe

I’m in love with my Wife, my Kids, Espresso, Data Science, tomatoes, cooking, engineering, talking, family, Paris, and Italy, not necessarily in that order.

No responses yet