Friday, January 29, 2010

My Garden Experience / Style





                                  
     I wanted to tell you about my experience gardening. First and foremost, my garden is the front of my major prepping. It really is. I know tons of people buy survival seeds, but do they really even know how to grow them if their life depended on it?

     I was more of an Art person, and what little experience I had with plants wasn’t exactly successful (being houseplants). Growing up my grandmother had raised me and my brother outta the ground. We depended on a garden and on the chickens for all of our food. I had seen plants, I had seen how they grew and how to tend them, but I had avoided it for years because I did not want to responsible for the massive plant massacres that I thought would occur. Then one year when all I had was a tent in the woods a friend brought me some seeds he had scavenged out of a rubbish bin. There was nothing wrong with them, they were from the season before, and I guess someone just threw them away, he asked me if I would grow them, seeing he said, that I was a nature child. I said I didn’t know how to grow anything, so he said, you just rake the soil spread the seed, water every once in a while and wait. 

Seemed simple enough to me. So that’s what I did, and less than half a season I was pulling in food left and right. It was good, so I did that for years afterwards, sometimes hiding vegetable plants where I didn’t think anyone would notice them. Onions in the park, a pepper plant at the arboretum, arugala by the library. No one would know, and the world would be my buffet. 

I only had one landscaper ever notice my addition, and a I soon found that he chose kale for the winter season and ornamental cabbages, he was also nice enough to tell me before they would be ripped out, so that I might take them home and eat them. 

It was quirky, but it worked for me. Latter on after I had come in from the wild, and settled, I grew herbs and salads in my apartment in hanging baskets, and I set up a micro farm in my 110 Square foot yard. Using Tupperware storage boxes for tomatoes peppers and onions and such. 

My neighbors were a bit wary at first, but then everyone admires the plants, the truly colorful addition in a mostly barren landscape. 

Then we got our house, we didn’t move in till July, so we were a bit late in the season, I had seed started late, and we waited. We had 4 acres, but we only planned to use a bit of it. We actually cut up the sod by hand, clearing the ground, and we set the plants in. 



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