A Little Background

My Wonderful Family

(Note: This is actually my first post for the blog, but it ended up on top after I finished playing/learning with draft mode.  Can't figure out how to move it back down -  here it stays.)

This is a log of my experience growing a garden in my backyard. Let me state this up front: THIS IS NOT IN MY NATURE. I am not a gardener. I don’t like getting down and dirty digging in the earth. I abhor weeding of any kind. I work 5 days a week as an analytical chemist, have almost an hour commute each direction, am the proud father of two delightful children ages 5 and 1, and my wife works insane hours as a medical resident.

In short: I don’t have time for this.

But I am a foodie and I love to cook almost as much as I love to eat. I have subscriptions to not one, but two cooking magazines which I read for the articles while barely ever having time to try out the recipes. Yet I try to cook most days out of the week, to feed both myself and my family filled with extremely picky eaters (except the youngest, bless her heart she seems to actually take after Dad). I frequent farmers’ markets for quality ingredients grown close to home for the simple reason that the quality is so much better than what you find in the giant supermarkets.

Let’s be clear though. I am not some naturalist, nor hippie/granola type. I do not worry overly much about organic this or heirloom that, though I do understand and appreciate the difference in quality, taste, and nutritional value that properly sourced food can provide. I love to harvest. The picking/cooking/eating is the part I am in this for, and I am not against using slow-release fertilizer pellets to ensure that the harvest will be bountiful. If you are looking for pure-organic gardening instruction there are plenty of other sources available on the interwebs.

I grew up with my mother’s garden providing a small bounty of fresh foods every summer, a garden that I had to help maintain (read: weed) regularly. That same wonderful woman also found time to cook great food for a family of 5 literally every night while working full-time as a high school teacher. What I remembered about her garden though was that it seemed like a lot of work for relatively little reward. Whether it was the limited space, time, soil quality, gardening experience, or no doubt a combination of all of these things – let’s just say that I can’t recall harvesting much beyond the tomatoes (which were plentiful and delicious and dutifully canned every fall for a winter’s worth of homemade spaghetti sauce - yum).

So growing up, backyard gardening seemed like a bad idea. That was my firm opinion until I met my wife, and more importantly, my in-laws. Gardening

View Of Fleuren House From Back Garden

doesn’t even begin to describe what my in-laws do; it is more a form of art. Just the trek from their house, past the barn (advantage: country living), and through their meticulously placed flower and shrubbery to the vegetable garden was a whole new experience for this city kid. Then being able to take a basket with and literally harvest dinner was life-altering. The resulting dinner was not fancy, but was none-the-less outstanding as the freshness of the food jumped and danced on the palette. I wanted this in my backyard too, but I am far too lazy to do what they do (read again: weed) like they do. It just seemed like I would never have what I wanted: Fresh vegetables picked and carried directly to my kitchen for immediate consumption without weeding, getting dirty, and the constant attention gardening requires.

Then last winter I finally caved. I wanted my own garden so bad that I began looking into raised-bed gardening. I am also cheap though, so I was busy trying to figure out what inexpensive material I could line my raised-beds with when I stumbled upon the answer to my ultimate dilemma: Straw Bales.

Prepared Bales (Soil Optional)

It turned out that some people on the interwebs insisted that using a frame of straw bales to surround a raised bed of garden soil was inexpensive and worked very well. Intrigued by this I entered it into Youtube and what I saw literally blew my mind. People were planting right into bales of straw with great results. Best of all, this kind of gardening required no soil, could be fully automated (with a little ingenuity), and best of all: almost no weeding. It seemed too good to be true, so I tried it. The results were eye-opening to say the least.