I have been gardening since the 1970s when my friend taught me how to grow marijuana indoors. At that time, I was surprised to learn how much I preferred the process of planting and growing rather than the process of smoking weeds. After the embarrassing Saturday morning incident, when a real estate agent hired to sell my apartment building opened an open house unannounced, I concluded that illegal plant cultivation could really be a vegetable garden, not my job. And as there was a place to work, I started gardening in earnest.
Most early vegetable gardens are too crowded and weed-infested holes in the rocked land. He gave me a few vegetables to realize that farming is difficult. This early garden overwhelmed my very limited gardening ability, making me feel exhausted and defeated in early July. But every spring, I found a bug and tried again. During Maine’s long winter, I read several books about growing vegetables and prepared an organic gardening magazine in the bathroom. As the Internet became more popular, I read the gardening forum thoroughly and joined several social media sites for home farmers. As a gardener I was terrible, but I was really into the activity.
Over time, these diverse sources of information combined seemingly endless horticultural failures and forces and began to have a positive impact on my agricultural technology very slowly. Today I’m taking care of a moderately successful garden that my family is running from early May to winter. It only took me 30 years because I am a fast learner.
I leave most of my limited success as a gardener to the MAIN ORGANIC FARMERS AND GARDENERS Association (MOFGA). MOFGA’s annual Common Ground Fair, held every September, offers a Q&A session to make a failed crop manager a pretty good gardener. And their quarterly newspaper gave me an in-depth approach to overcoming many garden problems. It’s like growing spinach for early spring harvests and growing garlic that kicks your butt. After joining MOFGA in 2011, my ability improved noticeably and the entire gardening process became easier.
Looking back at the 30 years of gardening, I recognize some important bonehead movements. I thought some readers could derive solace or personal satisfaction from some of the most glaring mistakes on their way to becoming certified ordinary gardeners.
My Teenage Horticultural Activities:
- Jerusalem Artichoke Planting—My sister-in-law teaches organic gardening in Massachusetts. She’s an organic wonder I’ve learned a lot over the years. She dresses like Mr. Green Jeans and is obsessed with strawberries. When I weed in front of her, she usually says I’m composting a salad. I see my sister-in-law the way Michael Corleone saw his brother Fredo. She’s my sister-in-law and I love her. But like Mike, it doesn’t mean he won’t kill her one day. You can see my sister-in-law has a little organic mean march there. I would have meant it when she handed me a bag of Jerusalem artichokes and said, “These are delicious to fry or salad.” But something tells me she was giggling behind her serious gardener poker face. Jerusalem artichokes are fully and aggressively invasive. They are transmitted by the extra-sprouted necropsy, which grows taller and sends artichokes into the ground in all directions. You won’t be able to remove them all and a new choke plant will grow on the choke slicer. They are lovely and I use mineral rich stems and leaves for my annual jegi bed layer. I’m sure when the last garden season is over and they take me to the dementia ward a new freak of Jerusalem Artichoke will spring up from my garden hill and be ready to take over the entire five villages. It’s in my sister-in-law’s favor now. I’m sure when the last garden season is over and they take me to the dementia ward a new freak of Jerusalem Artichoke will spring up from my garden hill and be ready to take over the entire five villages. It’s in my sister-in-law’s favor now. I’m sure when the last garden season is over and they take me to the dementia ward a new freak of Jerusalem Artichoke will spring up from my garden hill and be ready to take over the entire five villages. It’s in my sister-in-law’s favor now.
- Relaxation in July—I begin almost all of the garden season with intense activity that puts me on the doctor’s table to manipulate my back until June 1. I like April when there are cool and lively days in the bleak early gardens. I experience a thrill that I never get tired of at the time when birds travel. But for several years, I felt I needed a break until June 30th. The garden looked great, weeding, and bearing fruit. And I need a little break. So I’m going to take a very necessary breath for a few days. And it could turn into a few weeks and by the time I look at things again it could be August and my garden would have disappeared and been buried in running weeds or badly in need of nutrients and water. Under the annual Marathon Spring Gardening Therapy, my beautiful garden is almost dead and buried from August to April of the following year. Therefore, you need to adjust your speed to have patience and stamina to keep things going during the hot summer months. I’m looking at August as the month to start preparing for sowing next spring. It actually makes me healthier and less depressed when I rely on women who usually gamble, drink, and fast as a way to avoid the inevitable Maine winters.
- Falling in love with Brussels Sprout — Brussels Sprout is really good. If you search Google for their nutritional benefits, they list them as treatments for almost everything. I like salad, soup, saute or plain boiled. So adding Brussels Sprout to the garden planner made complete sense to me, but I had a hard time raising it well. I was too crowded with them. I gave them less water and gave them too much. I started them too early and plucked leaves too late. And now I have fungal or bacterial infections that cause the leaves to drop and the stems to rot. My Brussels bean sprouts look and smell like a hospital amputation plant on the Civil War battlefield. So for the time being, I’ll buy BP at the grocery store. Thank you.
- Napping in a compost heap—you laugh, but this “bad habit” has become very serious recently. When I first moved to Maine in early April and started gardening, I realized that it was time to take a nap because I was tired in the middle of the afternoon every day of gardening. It was quite a warm afternoon here in the sunny yard, and as long as it wasn’t damp, I lay down on the nearest pile of compost and fell asleep. These days, this is a sure way to get Lyme disease. I know it because I signed it for two summers. So I now have a small screen room that’s my garden nap spot. My wife felt a lot of injustice because she expected sharing from a $1400 family investment. But I miss the outdoors and the nap in the sun. Lyme disease is a serious problem and difficult to diagnose. Be proactive in protecting yourself. Right now, it’s advantageous.
- Walking a dog in the garden—about 12 years ago on an autumn afternoon, I was walking on an overly active Bichon Prize in my backyard. For some reason she was actually wearing a leather strap and was generally free to go around. We wandered into the autumn garden, where we were normally in the late summer weeding stage. Suddenly, a screaming Bob cat runs from the nettles and golden bars. It quickly jumped into a field under the garden. Bichon went crazy and almost dropped his personal manure, but Bobcat disappeared. I was left to contemplate whether it was really there. It was. I’m sure it was eating a squirrel that was eating other pests that I left out of control. This is what marriage teaches you. Every strange incident that happens can usually be traced to what the husband did.This is what marriage teaches you. Every strange incident that happens can usually be traced to what the husband did.
- Planting Compree—I have a friend who is a natural food lover. You know the people I mean. There is no soap, and I eat lentils and beans a lot and fart. These people are interested in the herbal miracle plant Compree. At least that’s what they say. “It’s very medicinal,” I heard my friend convinced. So one day at a yard sale, I saw some cute little Compree plants and bought them. Yes, I paid for the compay. Fortunately, they were planted in isolated areas where they were still grazing because they were aggressive and invasive weeds. (You see the bone head pattern here?) And it loves my yard. A garden expert at Common Ground Fair told me he was told the only way to get rid of a comprie was to “move.” Thankfully, I’ve read that these plants are good for apple trees, so I’m moving a lot of them near apple trees.
- Surprise my wife with Borage — Speaking of aggressive plants, a few winter nights ago I read in the FEDCO Seed catalog that Borage is good for pollinators. Coincidentally, it was the year my wife became a beekeeper after taking a class about bees.
As any beekeeper’s beloved husband would do, I found a plant that would provide pollen and honey to the bee colony that year. And barley turned out to be very popular with bees. But like Compri and Jerusalem artichokes, it was invasive, so as soon as the bee stung, it pulled out the plants. So I didn’t get stung. My wife didn’t even notice that I planted purple paper. Welcome to the club, Boraji. Unless you’re an infant, a honeybee or a cat in our house, you’re strictly second class.
- Planting Too Early—Main once experienced spring early enough to plant peas and carrots before the end of March. Once every 30 years. But the truth is I can never wait to plant. Prepare the motherboard in the fall so that it can be planted as soon as possible in spring. One of the reasons is to be satisfied and ahead of schedule by taking a nap in a compost heap. Alas, this mindset is not good for all vegetables. Bell cabbages grow better if left to grow until autumn. The cabbage varieties planted too early are just big chow wagons for flea beetles that thrive early in the main spring. And when the spring sowing season is cold and humid (often in Maine), by sowing early, the slug army settles in the lettuce field and sets up tables for leafy vegetables on motorboats. I’m the one who gets up early in everything. In my case, patience is learned and carried out by coercion, but I find that if I wait, the garden is better.
- Carrot Seed Broadcast – This is my wife’s favorite. Early in my gardening career, when I thought carrots could be simply planted in freshly ground soil with little extra planning or work, my wife came into the garden when I was trying to plant carrot seeds. The planks of the garden trail are wet and slippery because it rained a little that day. After preparing the carrot string, we carefully opened the FEDCO carrot seeds and gently shook the seeds to the front of the package to avoid boring thinning them out next month. I hurried up to the line and I’m sure I was lecturing my wife about gardening protocols when my boots slipped across a wet board. Responding quickly to my foot slipping, I began an ugly and awkward body movement, such as a runner sliding onto the home plate while doing wattage. And as I slipped, my hand lifted the open carrot package high and threw itself upward in an arc that offset my sliding torso and distributed all my carrot seeds throughout the garden area. This blundering spectacle eventually belonged to Broadway numbers, not my spring garden. Needless to say, my carrot was off Broadway that year and attendance wasn’t that high. Decades later I finally figured out how to grow carrots, but many failed carrot fields came and disappeared before me. There is a YouTube video about how to grow carrots in large containers worth watching. And you don’t need a dance number. Needless to say, my carrot was off Broadway that year and attendance wasn’t that high. Decades later I finally figured out how to grow carrots, but many failed carrot fields came and disappeared before me. There is a YouTube video about how to grow carrots in large containers worth watching. And you don’t need a dance number. Needless to say, my carrot was off Broadway that year and attendance wasn’t that high. Decades later I finally figured out how to grow carrots, but many failed carrot fields came and disappeared before me. There is a YouTube video about how to grow carrots in large containers worth watching. And you don’t need a dance number.
- Blaming crop devastation for anything other than slugs—more than 30 years of gardening in Maine, I’ve had a lot of setbacks in my garden and life. And for a long time in the garden, I had all kinds of pests and diseases that caused me to kill various plants according to what I read. I blamed the disappearance of the squirrel’s basil seedling, the Brussels sprout hole of the flea beetle, and the top of the deer’s torn broccoli. And I’m wrong almost every time. Surrounded by hay fields and prone to wet, cold hot springs, our land is often the perfect breeding ground for large, fat, sticky slugs. And large, fat, ugly, sticky slugs eat, shave, mucus, and generally destroy almost every plant worth growing. The only plant they don’t seem to eat is onions. So I now surround the lettuce and the early beet with onion seedlings. If you don’t like slugs as much as I do, plant onions here and there.
Bonus Bonehead Move. Compost Mouth—Our lovely nephew shines every summer away from his family, wandering around his aunt and uncle’s house for a week. She was about 5-6 years old and loved taking care of our daughters. She was the most loving, always kind, gentle, and very interested in learning about life. At the time I was struggling to control potato beetles in the garden and she helped me pick them out with my hands and crush them. The beetle eventually stopped growing potatoes because it was so difficult to manage organically. Anyway, on the fifth day of my nephew’s visit, my nephew and I came out of the house one fine morning and headed to the garden, she said kindly. Shocked, I quickly realized that there was no one to blame but me, her compost-mouth uncle. Sister-in-law 1, Jeff 1.
conclusion
Being a certified bonehead gardener isn’t all bad. I’ve learned a lot more about organic gardening, slugs, and Norinjae than I’d ever dreamed of. Gardening is ultimately a reward in itself. I go outside, exercise, eat fresh vegetables, and take a nap on the compost. What do you not like? rotten Brussels bean sprouts, vine vines hid in weeds, incoming woodchucks, more slugs than the Old Testament plague, mud mouths that cause potato beetles, children in the neighborhood, cattle, and neighbors. Gardening is great without counting those things like that. It’s really good. Really.