Planting the seeds of gardening... (groan)

It all started more than two decades ago in a rectangular backyard plot in the desert outskirts of Phoenix, Ariz..

Each March, my father—who spent his childhood working on dozens of farms in northern North Dakota—would crank up the Troy Built, carving a respectable traditional plot out of the caliche. We planted the usual suspects, all from seed, and we’d be harvesting tomatoes, zucchini, carrots and others by late June, early July. By August, everything would be burned up.

Dad made coaxing plants out of that vapid ground look easy—and the proof of that was in our fruit trees. Plums, peaches, grapefruit, two kinds of oranges, even an apple and a lemon tree all grew and flourished on our two acres.

After 22 years of living off that brittle land, I moved to eastern North Carolina, and eventually to the western NC mountains. It was in the tiny rural town of Brevard that I started learning about the importance of sustainable agriculture, and the importance of supporting local farmers.

Our first garden, lovingly named the UGP—Unnamed Garden Project—was a learning experience (with the first lesson being when a family of four offers to "do a garden with you" and your partner, it *is* simply too good to be true; you will end up weeding, watering, harvesting and figuring out what the hell to do with a bounty intended for 6 people). My desert bones and Rachel’s eastern Oregon upbringing left us more than conflicted when it came to knowing what to expect from the Appalachian mountains. It was a labor of love, and a comedy of errors (ask Rachel about the two rows of corn that disappeared overnight, or about the one, lone potato we *thought* had died, not knowing the plant part shriveled and dried when the potatoes are ready to be harvested).

But one thing that DID grow was our eagerness to do it right and do it better “the next time.” In the land of the small scale farmer, where it rains exactly enough that you don’t have to water and it’s sunny enough that everything is emerald and alive, we blindly groped our way to literally hundreds of tomatoes, dozens of zucchini, several robust heads of lettuce, and a whole slew of learning.

For every crop we harvested, there was a lesson in failure:
Our Roma tomatoes were great, but we ate a lot of green German Queens before we learned that not all tomatoes are ready at the same time. Our Romaine lettuce wasn’t “really tall,” it was bolting. That’s bad, in lettuce-land. Powdery mildew spreads faster that a rumor in high school (and I should know; I’m a high school teacher and an ignorant gardener!), but can be thwarted with a watering can of reconstituted nonfat dry milk. Cucumbers right out of the garden are slightly sweet, but can be cross pollinated by your crook necked squash (and crook neck cucumbers are not that tasty at all).

Each lesson I excitedly shared with my friends, many of which were met with those chuckles and ill-timed advice so readily available in the South.

But that massive garden gave us two of the greatest lessons we learned and is what inspired us to begin this blog; first, if you tell someone (anyone) you’ve got a garden, you will be inundated with (mostly contradictory) advice that will always come too little, too late; and two, if the weeds grow wildly, you’re at least doing SOMETHING right. Armed with that, I’m proud to admit that I’m an Ignorant Gardener, learning my way to successful growing, one failed crop at a time.