Gardeners Will Garden

 Gardeners will garden. No matter where we live, whether it is in drought-stricken states like California or rain forest states like Oregon or Washington, we will grow vegetables or flowers. 

We garden in containers, in raised beds, hydroponically, in greenhouses. no matter what we have to do, we WILL garden.

Here on Dodd Mountain in rural Arkansas, we have stone instead of soil. If  you scrape your foot on the ground, you will hit stone, not soil. So we have to make our own soil. We compost everything there is to compost. We never burn the leaves here. We put them in the compost heap. Often we just direct compost putting the leaves in plant beds using it as mulch over the winter.

After the road grader goes by on our dirt road, we harvest what it leaves behind and incorporate the clay into the compost.  Really, we do. We shovel the clay into a wheelbarrow and walk it up the driveway to the compost heap or sometimes into the garden itself. It can fill holes in a raised bed.  Actually, I don’t do that. I hire a strong young man to do it. 

We even have a deal with the electric company tree trimmers to dump their chipper/shredders in our yard so we can spread all that lovely mulch over the stone our house is built on. With time and patience, we may be able to harvest more than just the pine needles and acorns that fall every year. 

Gardening is not cheap here in Stone County. I garden in raised beds here using straw bales between logs from felled trees nearby. That took heavy machines to cut the trees, trim them into logs and put them in place. Straw bales are not cheap either. And the raised beds make it easy for me on my scooter to plant, weed and harvest. If they were not raised, I would not be able to garden.

You can see that perhaps buying produce at the grocery store might even be cheaper than gardening. But is any grocery store tomato anywhere near as good as the ones you harvest from your own garden?

Assorted peppers, green tomatoes for frying, cherry tomatoes for snacks while picking other veggies

English peas ready to be picked and shelled. Remember doing that with your grandmother sitting on the back porch?

I Get So Pissed Off

It seems to me that I should be able to do anything that I used to be able to do until I find that I can’t. Used to be, I could reach anything anywhere and haul it down, up or across. Now, not so much.

There’s no “Run to the store and pick up something,” Just to go to the store requires getting the scooter loaded on the lift and then hoping I can maneuver in the store, reach what I need and get past all the obstacles the store owners have put in my path. Every season brings new objects in the aisles. The barbecue grills are moving out now as are the huge bags of charcoal, fertilizer and pesticides.  Halloween pumpkins, costumes, ghosts and goblins have taken the space that used to have barbecue grills. Soon Halloween will give way to Thanksgiving and then the big holiday on Dec 25th. 

But I digress. Used to be, I would get a hammer out of the shed, drive in stakes for a fence and then string the fence, pull it tight and keep the deer out of the garden. Not any more.  Just getting to the hammer is almost impossible, let alone pounding fence stakes in.

Oh, the veggie garden is almost finished for the year, so the old tomato plants have to be pulled, put in the compost heap, stakes have to be put in their bin. Sounds easy and it really is.  Back and forth on the scooter for what seems like 50 times hauling posts to where they belong and pulled up tomatoes. Actually, it’s easier now than having to walk, I guess. Gotta stop bitching about it.

Weeds have to be pulled. Sounds easy, but pulling is not so easy from a seated position. 

In the flower garden, it's time to cut back the irises and most of the perennials. Again, hard to do when you have to do it sitting down.

At least, my scooter battery is fully charged, so I have no real excuse not to do what needs to be done.

Oh and I can get down the driveway to the mailbox faster than Donna can. That’s one thing that’s easier.