My Garden Home

My Garden Roots

It started with a modest "salsa garden," growing hot peppers and tomatoes next to a few salad fixings and sundry herbs. I enjoyed it enough to dig a bit more each year to add a few things the following season.

Then, in the Fall of 2003, I stopped by Edgewater farm stand to buy some extra canning tomatoes. Browsing while I waited for my box of canners, my eyes fell on a bulb of garlic that they had grown... in my neck of the woods... not California, but here in New Hamshire where we have real winters. It suddenly ocurred to me that I could possibly grow my own garlic. Garlic! So I bought a half-dozen bulbs along with my tomatoes.

Once home, I quicky started to second-think, and then doubt, my ability to grow my very-favorite food. With nothing to lose, I broke up the cloves, pushed them into an out-of-the-way bed I had dug the year before, and basically forgot about them.

The following summer I caught myself simultaneously wondering, "what had happened to the cloves I had planted," and, "what were those odd curly flower stalks in my garlic patch?" Once I shook off the cognitive dissonance, I gently removed some soil around one of the stalks, and there it was: a small, but growing, bulb of garlic.

In that moment I was hooked. Since then my garden has snowballed (an apt New Hampshire metaphor) to over three-dozen different crops, including over two-dozen varieties of garlic. In 2009, my garden consists of roughly 2,000 square feet of partially-raised beds.

Growing A Garden

Built on top of an old dairy, and then horse, pasture, the "soil" was very rocky and thoroughly compacted. After a quickly-aborted attempt to till a garden plot by a friend with a tractor (lest his brand-new tiller be ruined for good) it was clear that the only solution was to dig down by hand, remove as much rock as possible, and then raise my beds to provide decent depth.

Each year I have done more digging, raising, and partial-filling so my garden is a spectrum of age, depth, and fertility. Curiously, the digging and associated hard labor is among my favorite garden work. There is an earnestness that appeals to me, and even if my day yields but a fraction of what remains to be done, my body tells me a genuine story of accomplishment.

I expect that I have come pretty close to my garden's final footprint. It is (more than) large enough for my needs and I am running out of contiguous real estate. Over the next couple of years I have a squash-hill project to finish, and a few more pole-beds to dig for peas and beans, and then my days of purging New Hampshire granite from my garden will be done. I can rest at ease, however, in the knowledge there will always be plenty of other fulfilling hard labor to be done.

Crop Report