Growing up in Illinois my mom gardened and I remember helping my grandma and grandpa out in their garden. When I got to an age where I might be able to absorb some of their wisdom it just seemed like a chore.

I had a few reasons to start a garden. The biggest reason was to get more connected to where food comes from. I watched a German documentary on food production. It shows how detached we are from our food, how it is an industrial process. To so many people food is something grown on another continent that comes out of a plastic wrapper. I want Ryder to understand the food comes from the Earth, that we have a connection to the Earth and that it sustains us.

I also think gardening is a good thing to know just in the food supply is disrupted. History is punctuated with people who thought it (whatever it is) could never happen here and now. Not that a few cucumbers will get you off the grid but I'm sure it'd help.

Gardening is a good workout. There are so many new hobbies I'd like to pick up but as a computer person I don't want to do even more sedentary activities.

So last year I thought I'd try out gardening. I had one goal for the garden; to make salsa just from plants in the garden. I read a few books (Gardening When it Counts and Vegetable Gardeners Bible) , got some tools and seeds and I was ready. I'll go through the chronology and then cover some lessons learned.


Earth
On April 16th this is what the garden looked like. There was grass growing on the dirt. Lots of work to be done.

I think I should have started sooner. I could have prepped the soil and planted some things sooner.




Preparation
After a few days work this is what the garden looked like. Of all the gardening I did this was the most work. I had to turn over the soil and amend it.

Colorado doesn't have great soil. Going back to Illinois it's amazing how rich and dark all the soil is. It'd be nice to fill up a truck and take some back. But in Colorado, yeah, you have to add to your soil if you want to grow anything. At some later point I'd like to get into composting.


Planting
I planned on growing tomatoes, cucumber, kale, onions, radishes, carrots, peppers and a bunch of herbs.

I built up berms and planted things far apart so I could get by with less artificial fertilizers and weeding would be easier. There are also suggestions for things that are good to plant close to each other. Sometimes this is because the plants have complimentary nutrient requirements, sometimes it's because the plants help discourage pests from each other.

Neglect
This year we took a long vacation and this is how the garden looked when we got back. Weeds pretty much took over. I didn't use any weed killer while gardening.

Weeds are very manageable when you chip away at them once a week. Any more neglect than that and they become hard work to remove. It took a few sessions of weeding for me to get the garden back to where it needed to be. Besides initially turning over the soil this was the most difficult work I did on the garden.

Harvest
This isn't a great representation of how fruitful the garden got. The cucumbers came in a lot more and the kale got very bushy.








First Frost
This is how the garden looked after the first frost. The peppers never came in, either did the tomatoes fully. The tomatoes that were turning red got what appeared to be circular stretch-marks and that pretty much ruined them. The others didn't turn from green to red unfortunately.




Post-Mortem
Allow me a meta-moment here, what's interesting to me is that I took a very similar approach to when I'm learning something about computers. I tend to jump right in without knowing everything I need to know to see how far I can get. In the computer field this avoids the analysis-paralysis syndrome where you keep diving into things you don't know and never really get anything done. On the down-side you sometimes make mistakes. But in the computer field things are easy to change especially if you've kept things simple.

In the same respect with gardening, I deliberately disregarded things I should do and didn't investigate things I should have. I don't feel very bad about this. I managed to stay motivated, charge ahead and I learned some good lessons. Ultimately I know some of those lessons better because of my failures.

Lessons Learned
Listen to old people, they know what they're talking about. My father-in-law and my mother both said that I'd need to buy small tomato plants instead of just planting tomato seeds in the ground. I took this advice but I did it too late. I should have put tomato plants in the ground first thing because at the end of the year I was probably weeks away from a big tomato harvest when the first frost came to ruin all the plants. I might try to grow tomato seeds indoors before planting one of these years.

Tomatoes can get too much water. The circular stretch-marks on my tomatoes were because they got too much water. You would think tomatoes are full of so much water that they'd take all they can get. In my garden I have a sprinkler and it just hit the tomatoes too much, that's a problem.

Trellis tomatoes before they need it. If you're behind the game on trellising your tomatoes it becomes harder work than it should be.

Peppers want warm soil to germinate. The peppers were a total failure. I think they didn't come up because I planted them too soon.

Pay attention to how long it takes for things to grow. Cilantro comes up very fast. Next time I grow it I'll stagger rows of it so it doesn't all come in at once.

Grow what you'll eat. From what I read, all first time gardeners make this mistake. They don't anticipate what they'll eat and end up wasting a lot. I don't know why I grew radishes, I hate them. Times would have to be tough for me to eat a radish. I also grew a lot of kale. Kale is the hardiest and most nutritious thing you can grow. In a tight-spot kale might be good to have. Otherwise it's a gamy tasting leaf thing. All the recipes you find that include kale also have some other kale-taste-killing ingredient like bacon.

Cucumbers rock. My son and I ate lots of cucumbers straight from the garden. My wife turned me on to eating raw cucumbers with some Tony Chacheries spice, it's a good thing. The boy just ate them raw. We'd go to the garden, he'd pick out a cucumber, we'd cut it off, wash it and he'd eat it right there. We'd do the same thing with carrots.

Failure
If my one goal was to make a salsa from the garden I did fail. The tomatoes didn't come in, ugh they looked so close when the frost came. The peppers didn't come in either. I did have onions and cilantro; not enough for a respectable salsa.

Overall I learned a lot, it was very rewarding and I'm sure I'll do more gardening in the future.