I grew up working in the garden to grow most of our food. We spent our spring in planting and our summers in harvesting and preserving. Throughout the years I’ve managed to get my hands in the dirt for at least a plant or two. There is just something about spring… Now that my kids are grown and I have land and more time, it’s grown to include a fall and even winter garden here in the south. Then, when I was researching what strawberries I would need to order I found this forum and now I am “branching out” into fruit trees and muscadines and berries and I’m even thinking about trying a graft. Seeing the posts here and what some of you are growing and the resourcefulness you use has me taking on more projects that I would have never thought to try.
I agree with all of you…exercise, therapy, food (just tastes better when you grow it), bragging rights, leaving the land just a little better… no matter the reason it just scratches an itch!
I grew up helping my mom weed and hoe the garden. I remember that I’d always want to run the roto-tiller (one of those old front tines things that vibrate your hands to numbness) to help out. I think I was always fascinated by the stages of growth of plants and getting something from them.
A few years ago I lived on the 8th floor of a 12 story complex and had tomatoes on my balcony. I got in trouble for that when a few fell onto the pool deck below.
Now I almost exclusively orchard (is that a verb?) instead of garden. I do help my dad when I get spare time plant and harvest a vegetable garden with the summer staples - beans, corn, tomatoes, cukes, etc. The fruits are more rewarding to me with the sweetness.
And the big thing for me is that growing fruit seems to entail learning so much more about the yearly cycles of the plants, the diseases, and the insects. You’d think I’d have enough learning from my day job, but I find it hard to turn off my curiosity.
It skips a generation, you can get them back by teaching the grand kids to garden.
My kids have no interest either. Although they do like some of the food I give them.
I garden because I like to grow plants, they fascinate me, they don’t have to be edible either.
I’m in Michigan and have cacti growing year round, outside. I have Bamboo too, I want to add some hardy Yucca trees. I discovered a few more genera of cacti besides Opuntia that grows here, so I need them too. I have house plants too.
House plants give back in ways people do not realize. They increase the amount of oxygen in my house, so I think clearer, they also remove pollutants in the air. One of their best features is when i talk to them, they don’t talk back! Wish my kids would take a lesson from my plants!
My 3 boys garden & orchard. I wish I had their vigor and strength. They ask me to prune and graft. I used to help them plant, now just give them lots of plant starts. Good to see them ‘into it’. Grandkids come over to ‘help’ me. They are also homeschooled so their schedule is flexible - and besides, it’s educational.
I’m hoping my daughter will have children. She wants kids, but is caught up in a high profile corporate career at General Motors. She has a chance to make very good money. So it might not happen. She is already 31, so time is running out. My son is married too, but no chance of kids there I’m afraid, not that he doesn’t want them, it’s just not possible.Hopefully he will be a good uncle!
Ahh I see that now, you have to post at a 6th grade level, else it’s going over my head! Like Jethro, I made it to 6th grade!
My children are too busy, they don’t even see the garden.My kids will not eat anything with a bone, nugget form only. I’m not sure how that happened? My daughter will even gag at the site of boned meat. So no doubt gardening is out of the question. When they were young, i didn’t garden much, i was way too busy keeping food on the table. So I never really had a chance to show them. I’m hoping with time, they will see the light, but it doesn’t really matter, as long as they are happy.
It’s not just me, Just yesterday i saw a report that said the average age of new farmers is 60 years old, my age! I see little hope for upcoming generations.
When I retired, I started gardening again, the kids were gone. hard to garden when you work 16 hours a day. My longest streak of working without a day off is 71 days.
I love, love, love… your “canvas” and wished to do the same here. My wife and kids would drown me with their scorns for me being so out of wack with this passion!
I’ve always found myself forgot the tickling clock, deeply immersed whenever I work in my little heaven, be it planting seedlings, digging holes, re-arranging the garden path or transporting assorts bucketful of horse manure in a beat up minivan in the middle of summer day!
Hard to explain a passion! It’s a place where I recharged and kept my sanity, my little heaven…
Very nice hostas, my mother grows them in her yard. It has lots of shade and the do well if you can keep the slugs off of the leaves. My yard is just too sunny I think.
I have some hostas that can take full sun, just a common type. Been there forever, I didn’t put them in, my wife or mother did.They are in full south sun.
What kind of wood did you use to make those cool looking terraced beds to the left in the pics looking down the steps? How long do you think they will last before needing replacement? I’m thinking of doing some terracing in the front yard and stone work is either a lot of work or very expensive. Could do it with wood, but then it needs to be replaced on some interval…
I love hostas. I have 21 different ones. Would have much more, if not the space restriction… They are so beautiful in spring… Do you happen to know the name of the yellow one in right bottom corner of your photo?
I do not use pressure treated wood, and cedar is too expensive . So I end up with home-depot 2’’ pine boards. They do last for about 5 years, unless you need to change something in the bed. Also you have to be careful when tilling or digging that bed after 2-3 years. But for perennials, they easy stay for 5 years. Also, that left side from the steps is all big rocks, so boards there also have some natural support. When my husband made steps, he added some support for the boards as well. In fact, those steps I would say only permanent structure in my yard. The rest I keep for couple years, then rearrange to accommodate something new I decided to plant. So cheap pine works for me pretty well. And when it rots, I just use the boards as fillers where I need them or bring them to compost station.
I moved to OR after college and couldn’t believe how big the trees were. At the same time I started noticing peoples gardens. A girl in my neighborhood told me the nursery five blocks away was hiring so I went there and got a job.
I carried a ‘Sunset Western Garden Book’ at my side for more than a year at work and I read it cover to cover several-many times at home. My boss lived in the neighborhood and when both of us were transferred to another location, a 1/2 hour drive or so - as I drove I asked him what everything I saw was. Three years went by fast. I did some other work as a landscaper; a tree/shrub/turf technician in OR over a 6-month period and returned home.
I worked for a couple nurseries and did another year of being a tree/shrub/turf technician. ‘Technician’ meaning I was ‘big league.’ lol. You didn’t need to know sh#t to have the title technician… in my case, I did know what I was looking at and what I was looking for and how to apply fertilizers and pesticides to turf. The majority working in these jobs are kids that never gardened or didn’t know the landscape plants and so forth and on and on.
Grafting got me 14-years ago. Propagation got me. I still propagate 1000 times more than what I should.
Personally I find that many professional landscapers are some of the least knowledgeable people about plants I know. Last spring, a young man working for a landscape company was dutifully trimming the leaves of a cycad into a nice cube like it was privet or boxwood. The guy who kept my parents yard after my mother who once was a landscape designer got Alzheimers would prune oak trees, wisteria, and cherry laurel growing in the azaleas into neat boxes with the azaleas. The guy had been landscaping in Statesboro Georgia for 50 years and admitted that he could not tell an oak tree from an azalea bush or a camellia bush. Thanks to my mom I knew most of the common flowering and vegetable plants by the time I was about six. Landscaper who know what they are doing are amazing and a blessing. But in many cases even the managers and owners of the companies don’t know basic horticultural principles or the common ornamental plants and weeds you encounter in a South Georgia landscape. God bless.
I agree, although some do know there stuff no doubt. It’s not just them though. I see professionals like the guy who does the tv show “Growing a Greener World” In the episode I saw he was planting fruit trees, and he buried it too deep, didn’t think about it settling and making a depression where the tree was. The hole was deeper than wider. he didn’t do one thing right. The only excuse is some of these techniques are new. At least he didn’t add compost! Not that would hurt, but could make a bathtub if not mixed with local soil. I often need to add soil as I want a mound. These things settle so much, and I don’t have a lot of local soil. I use the worst soil I can find, usually a top soil. Most top soil is not as good as my local soil which is top rate by itself. A beautiful clay loam.
The soil in my yard is wonderful as well, thanks in part to a wisteria infestation that went unchecked for years. Wisteria is a terrible invasive weedy vine that is impossible to really get rid of, but its a great nitrotrogen fixer. The nice thing about a fairly sandy soil is that it does not compact very easily, and you don’t usually have to worry as about creating a bowl of water unless the water table is near the surface or you have a hardpan. Here you need a fair amount of compost in most places when you plant to help hold moisture and nitrogen in unless you are planting bare root muscadines which can be burnt by the nitrogen in too much organic matter. However, lots of people plant too deep, and I know of a nursery that overcompensates by telling people to plant too shallow. For sure I have seen plant shows with so-called experts give bad plant advice, but it’s also really important for people to know that when an expert is giving good advice, it might be bad advice in the wrong climate or under the wrong soil conditions. God bless.
