Garden Lesson #7

It may seem a bit early for garden talk, especially with the chilly reception that March has been giving us so far. But our garden plot has now been reserved for our third year and discussions have begun about our garden plans this year.

This is the year that we'll learn a little about sustainability. Gardens are wonderful ways of producing food for yourself and your family each summer, but my mother and I are making plans to figure out how this food production can spill into the following seasons. Since we rent a public garden plot that is plowed over each spring and fall, we can't plant perennials, which is the obvious form of sustainability in a garden, but I don't think there a lot of vegetables that are perennials anyway. Asparagus is the only one I can think of off the top of my head.

I'm referring to seed saving. We are going to attempt to plant some tomato seeds that we saved from last fall. To be fair, they weren't from the tomatoes we grew in the garden last year, since they all died from disease, but we saved some seeds from heirloom tomatoes that some friends had bought at a farmer's market. They were absolutely delicious, and I couldn't pass up the chance to possibly have a whole crop of those this year. They have been dried and stored in a dark, dry corner of the basement over the winter. We are now hoping that they will spring to life when we plant them indoors sometime this month. If this works, we can look forward to having the same delicious tomatoes year after year.

Our other sustainability experiment will be with our potatoes. We had an abundance of potatoes last year, which we have since figured out - we should have cut our seed potatoes into smaller pieces before planting them. But, the potatoes have brought me almost through the winter and I haven't had to buy any since last summer some time. We still have a lot of potatoes left, but they have all sprouted eyes and are beginning to taste...old. It doesn't matter how I prepare them, something isn't quite right. So, instead of throwing them all out, we'll plant some of them as seed potatoes this year. We're not brave enough to do a whole crop of them, so we'll do some test mounds this year and see how it goes. Since we weren't really planning on doing this, we aren't sure if they should have been stored or preserved differently.

If our experiments are successful, not only will we save money on buying new seeds or plants each spring, we will learn a little bit more about how our earth has been designed for life. Even through death and decay, life can spring forth each year (given the right climate conditions). If even the birds of the field don't worry about what they'll eat tomorrow, then neither should we. But I think this knowledge has been lost on most urbanites.