Growing Green: How I Got Started

Intro:

Hello, hello! Recently I was invited to speak at a women's fellowship time. I was asked to share my experience gardening, to talk about the tips I think are most important, and to share a devotional. I'm not sure how successful I was at doing any of those things, but decided to share that information here. I figure it'll give me a place to keep the info handy and maybe it will be useful to my friends who read it.

The first installment is a prologue of sorts. I'm calling it Growing Green: How it All Started. This post might not be interesting to many but maybe it will encourage women who are curious about gardening but not sure they have the time. Or not sure that they'll be able to figure it out. Or not sure that it's even worth a try. (That was me!) 

Gardening has become a big part of my life these days--something I never saw coming. It's a passion, a hobby, and oftentimes a tool God uses for refining my stubborn spirit. I hope the information in the coming posts is useful to readers, giving you the confidence and enthusiasm to give gardening a try.

How it All Started

I didn’t grow up gardening or doing any of the homemakey things that I enjoy today. Both of my parents worked hard, physical jobs in the California heat, so by the time they got home they were exhausted. Instead of baking bread, we baked Papa Murphy’s pizzas. Instead of spending time outdoors, we watched movies. And instead of days in the garden, we mowed the lawn and called it good. I never thought that I’d be a person who enjoyed the domestic arts or had a large garden each year. Here's how it happened:

After welcoming our first child, my husband became convinced that I should quit my job and stay home with her. I eagerly accepted his invitation and began my life as a homemaker gladly.

In the first years I was finding my footing. By the time our oldest was 3, we had welcomed 2 more children and home life was hopping-busy. Gardening was still the furthest thing from my mind--I didn’t need any more work to do!

At 24 years-old, I was mama to three babies. We moved to a town two hours away from our families and hadn't yet made friends in our new community. I might have been lonely but every precious day was filled to the brim as I figured out how to manage my time and tend to everything that needed tending. 

In fact, I remember talking with Jeff about one of his hobbies. He paused and asked, “Aren’t there any hobbies that you want to take up?” I thought about it and said, “No.” He seemed surprised that I wasn’t the least bit curious about anything beyond raising kids, homeschooling, and making dinner. In hindsight I see that I just didn’t have the bandwidth for anything more. I was exhausted at the end of each day.  Happy, but exhausted.

What I was about to learn was that while I couldn't or wouldn’t muster the energy to try enriching my own life, I’d happily do it for my children. 

The kids, 2009

Around the time that my oldest was 5 or 6, I started to notice that every one of her friends had been signed up for some kind of class or activity. Piano, dance, gymnastics, soccer, basketball, chess, and theater: they were all into something. I knew that we couldn’t afford most of those things and honestly felt momentarily discouraged. I hated the idea that our children were going to have a less full life because we couldn’t provide these extras. I asked God to give me creative ideas to provide our kids with some of the fun that their friends were enjoying, and He answered my prayer so many times. Some of the ideas that I pursued ended up being a good fit for our family and others failed. I’ll give you an example of one of the failures:

At the time piano lessons were $50/month. I knew we couldn’t pay $150/month for the next 8-10 years to have all of our children learn, but not to worry, I had an idea! I would take piano lessons myself, paying the $50/month, then come home and teach the kids what I learned. Four people could learn piano for the price of one! This seemed like a great idea. I wondered why other people weren’t doing the same thing! 

Then I discovered why not. 

What I never considered was the time commitment of taking the lessons, practicing the lessons, teaching the lessons to three children, and then enforcing piano practice for said children, all on top of my other responsibilities. The scheme lasted two months before I waved the white flag and admitted that it wasn’t working. It's worth mentioning that two of my kids became interested in piano during their teen years and were able to use a piano app to teach themselves the basics. I had to laugh after seeing how cheaply and painlessly they picked it up. I thought they were going to be uncultured or at a disadvantage because they missed out, but God knew there were other ways to give them everything they needed.

I couldn’t take them to the movies but I could teach them to bake. I couldn’t take them on vacation but I could take them to the library to check out laundry baskets full of books each week. God gave me so many ideas, and as time went on I got better at discerning which ideas were a good fit for our family.

Around 2010 Pinterest launched, giving me unlimited ideas for projects and homeschooling resources. My eye often caught on posts showing DIY garden projects. The idea of starting with a tiny seed and ending up with a gigantic plant was exciting to me, but I was intimidated. I didn’t know a thing about growing plants! Still, I thought it would be a great project for teaching the kids about plant life.

I got a package of zucchini seeds and the kids planted them in dollar store tubs that we drilled holes into. We watered them and watched them grow. Well, in reality we forgot to water them and then drowned them, but still they grew! By the time we had our first zucchini to harvest, I was hooked! From then on, I container gardened.

My first raised bed was at a duplex we rented. I grew a lot of food in gallon water jugs, baby spinach tubs, and even a worn out sand box! Eventually we bought a house and my husband built a large cinder block raised bed. I loved it. 

Part of our cinder block raised bed, our compost pile potato experiment (which worked!), and one of the fruit trees we planted.

For the first time I could grow a lot of food! I didn't have the budget for any real gardening equipment but experimented with planting seeds in eggshells, old yogurt cups, produce containers, and dollar store peat pots. I remember looking around my garage thinking, "What else can I use to hold some dirt?"

When I say I planted in anything and everything, I mean it! Anything free or cheap that could be used to corral soil into a pile was fair game.

One of the first things I had to come to grips with was that, while gardening is exciting, it can also be discouraging. I still didn’t know much about gardening at that point, so ended up making a lot of mistakes. In addition to being inconsistent with water, light, and fertilizer, I also went toe-to-toe with squash and cucumber beetles, slugs, birds, and deer. Often I have felt like it’s a miracle that any plant makes it to maturity!

Our side yard in Brookings, Oregon.
We only had time to put in a little berry patch and some fruit trees before we began traveling full-time. The deer kept me humble. Every so often I'd step outside and see that all of the leaves had been removed from my trees. The spray that was supposed to deter them did nothing.

They left one baby leaf to taunt me, I'm convinced. Deer can demoralize a gardener faster than anything.

It seemed that I had signed myself up for the Gardening School of Hard Knocks. Gardening was too much fun to quit and by then I knew that there was so much potential for joy. I was and am still in awe of the miracle of plant life. I'm grateful that God allows me this opportunity to participate with Him in creating living gardens full of plants, pollinators, and, yeah, pests, too. 

So that's how I stumbled my way into being a keeper of gardens. In the coming posts, I'm going to break down my top tips, giving you the information and resources that I wish I had when I first started out. Maybe I can help someone to thrive quicker than I did.