Green and Growing Things

I've always enjoyed gardening. When I was in grade school I would grow pole beans along our fence line, and would spend time during summer afternoons talking to a lady who sold flowers near where we lived. I have no clue what got me into it, nor where I would have gotten pole bean seeds to begin with. But it stuck with me.

There's a lot to like about gardening. I like researching what to grow, I love eating things that I grew myself, I enjoy the aesthetics of a yard full of blooming fruits and vegetables, and I like my yard working for me rather than being a dull, formless turf that sucks up water and time and benefits no one. If I'm going to spend time and energy in my yard I might as well have something to eat at the end of it.

Still, I'm also kind of lazy. I've tried growing just about anything you can think of. One of the first things I tried growing when we moved into our house was those same prolific pole beans I grew as a kid. But a very aggressive bug would demolish them as soon as they started to get going. The solutions presented were: lots of pesticide, picking them off by hand every day during mid day, or growing your beans exclusively in containers.

My solution was to not grow beans. I've similarly given up on finicky or space-hungry plants like cauliflower, peas, potatoes, and cucumbers. This used to bother me.. a lot. But I've become very okay with my policy of sticking with what works and giving up on what doesn't. I take the same approach with landscaping. My strategy is to plant a lot of things that might be fun and see what survives the one-two punch of crappy clay soil and my innate laziness and negligence. Some of the survivors of this either very Zen or very Darwinian process are: elderberries, raspberries, blackberries, and lemon balm.

I realize that tastes in landscaping are quite diverse, and some people would see this and think that it looks chaotic and horrifying. Mostly though, people think it looks like we must have worked really hard to get all of these herbs and berry bushes going. In reality, all we really do is some trimming back now and then. We love the natural contours and privacy of the arrangement and the raspberries that just started coming in this year. Birds love the elderberries, rabbits and squirrels appreciate the cover, and pollinators flock to the lemon balm, goldenrod, and golden alexander.

One thing that I decided I really did want that I couldn't coax into growing in the clay was tomatoes. As I looked around for an "easy button" I found something called EarthBoxes, which are these "self-watering" containers that promised giant tomato plants with virtually zero work once set up. These are the kind of infomercial claims that made me immediately reject the idea. But I came back to it several years in a row and eventually decided it couldn't hurt to try one and I was blown away by the results. Rarely, if ever, have I had something surpass expectations as much as these things have.

This was a bit meandering, but I suppose if there's a point it's that growing things can be fun, and that there are other options than bullying your yard into being a golf course (which is totally okay if that's what you like, you should enjoy your space is another point). We've had so much fun learning over time (and with many false starts) just how extensive and varied the Venn diagram is of things that we like that also want to grow in our yard. To wax philosophical for a moment, it also feels right somehow to just sit and watch. That beautiful clematis that I planted and babysat for a year and a half got swallowed up by the rampaging raspberry bush. I did fight it for awhile but now I don't, and I love what's there. Letting go, picking battles, working with instead of against–these are things I constantly learn and relearn. If someone reads this and thinks that all of that sounds suspiciously like code for "lazy" that's okay too.