My Green Thumb
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.