My Garden: Purdue Year One

My garden is a chaotic mess, and will probably continue to be until some external force imposes order upon me. The garden is chaos because my mind is chaos, as the things one creates often reflect the mind of the creator. Also, just as my mind, the garden remains unfinished; The fences are all temporary, the soil in my raised beds is mostly clay still, my back patio is a mud pit(until I can get it properly graveled), and nearly every project remains unfinished. It is due to this state of chaos and disorder that I fear to bring others into my little xanadu. Others bring with them preconceptions, and preconceptions judgement. I look to no man for approval over my life and projects, but I suffer great social anxiety when dealing with words and looks of judgement regarding my life, work, or art. I view my garden as some synthesis of the three, so I feel it necessary to share it in some way. I hope you enjoy my wild garden!

This spring I was consumed with an overwhelming desire to grow everything. I remained untempered in this excitement despite the impending limitations of yard space, sunlight, soil, and time. Whilst in this fugue state, I purchased an absurd array of seeds, for a whole host of reasons, and then I made this elaborate schedule to help me keep track. Lord knows only about a third of the seeds I bought made it to that schedule. In the end, I hadn't counted on the poor soil I was working with, so my first wave of crops in all of the raised beds ended up taking most of the season to mature. Now it is too late to plant anything for this fall. I had high hopes, and now I have plenty of seeds for next year!

One reason my garden is such chaos is the drastic changes I'm making to the landscape design of my yard. I'll have to do a sketch of the property sometime, but for now the deal is this: Since we're talking about the garden, I'll talk about the backyard only, and since we're still talking about the garden, only the uppermost tier of my backyard, which I have fenced in to contain my dogs. It's not huge, and until February of this year, most of it was a big ugly old deck surrounded by ornamental plants, a swing-set, and a dumpy old playhouse. I tore out all of that in order to install a big window in my basement(story for another time), bought a couple pallets of retaining wall blocks and paving stones, and restructured my back yard. I should do before & after drawings in a post sometime.

Once my new landscape design had been laid out, I seeded a remarkable amount of radishes into 2/3rds of my long raised bed, which ended up staying there until I stomped them down and turned them under just this week. The other 1/3rd was seeded in cabbage, carrots, and beets. The soil ended up being too clay-tight for me to harvest the carrots, but the beets loved it and popped right up. My cabbage was sacrificed to the loopers. In my short raised bed, I planted sweetcorn, for secret experimental reasons, and in many containers, I planted things from Okra to Tobacco, Paw-Paw to Paprika, Sunchoke to Sweet pepper. . . You get the idea.

I seeded much more into my trays than I ended up using, as I ran out of room quickly once I actually started to plant. I won't bother to list everything I seeded here, but the planting schedule I shared was followed near religiously until June, when I realized it was all thrown entirely off by my collectively poor growing conditions, then my radishes flowered and filled my backyard with butterflies. I didn't want to lose the butterflies, so I kept the radishes. Carbon in the soil for next year, I suppose. That was part of the plan all along anyway, to use this year to put biomass into the soil for future years, but when a schedule like that get's blown I get disappointed. I am running a soil building 'experiment' in which I use radishes, carrots, and other to inject organic matter into the soil, in an attempt to quickly build soil structure. I have great hopes for that experiment, and I got a lot of O.M. into the soil this year, which is a grand start.

On a different note, my sweet corn did surprisingly well in the poor soil, and I managed to harvest more seed for next year than I had purchased in the first place, so it worked out. Especially since this year I really wanted to establish my own seed stock of a number of different things that I know I'm going to want more of in the future. Things like Apios Americana, heirloom peppers, tomatoes, mustard greens, and of course, radishes. I'll have plenty for next year, so I'll consider it a success!

In the sweetcorn plot though, I run a different experiment. Have you heard of Huitlacoche? If not, now you have. Considered a delicacy in many cultures, it's something I've never had, and in the pursuit of that new experience, I grow sweetcorn. Huitlacoche is the fruiting body of a fungus known as 'corn smut' in the USA, and it looks as gnarly as it's supposed to be delicious. It's hard to cultivate and I'm hoping to build up a colony of the fungi in the soil of my short bed by growing some amount of sweet corn in the plot every year, in a perverted reverse crop rotation. Once I get one sample, I should be able to make a syringe innoculant, and produce greater quantities in the future. Just another specialty crop that few others have heard of, which I'll know how to cultivate.

Another major goal I had this year was to successfully cultivate, study, and propagate several domesticated cultivars of Apios americana(American Groundnut). I did this by planting five tubers of two different cultivars in 12 inch containers. At this point, all of those starts have performed well this year, and I am hopeful that I will be able to split the root masses of these into three or four times what I started with. I am trying to grow an inventory of Apois americana starts, from the five tubers I purchased online. I intend to plant and train A. americana as a trellised ornamental flowering vine, as it has similar visual characteristics to Wisteria. My intent is to slowly convince those I know to plant these productive vines all over. In this way I hope to safeguard those that I love from hunger, and assuring their access to growing stock for some productive crop, should lean times come.

For similar reasons, I also purchased and planted 3 Sunchoke tubers, which I planted into 12 inch containers until they outgrew them, at which time I transplanted all three into the ground surrounding my new basement window. They seem to be doing well, but this winter I will be testing one too see if it can successfully overwinter in my zone, and two will be dug up and chilled according to general guidelines for propagation. Here's hoping that we don't have a particularly cold winter!

I hope you've enjoyed the photos and words about my gardening adventures this year, and I hope you'll join me next year. For those of you who are wondering if you'd be welcome to come see my garden, the answer is yes. A friendly face is always welcome.