Back to my Roots is what I love!

You have probably been wondering where I was as I have not posted for about a month. 

With this title, you might think I am going to talk about my love of genealogy, but in this case you would be wrong.  Going back to my roots is literally roots or gardening. 

I have been literally playing in the dirt.  It all started on our way back from spring break in Washington, D.C. I was in the airport just googling on my phone about community gardens in our area back home.  That is when I found the website for our county community garden.

Let me backtrack just a little about why we were looking for a community garden.  You see our family loves to can our own dill pickles and bread and butter pickles at home every year.  My little garden patch doesn’t grow cucumbers well as it is too shady.  We had to purchase the small cucumbers and we were not satisfied with the quality we were finding at the farmer’s market.

Before I filled out the form, I asked my son-in-law if he wanted to try the community garden and of course he wanted to as he is our number one dill pickle eater!  I love both, and chopped up bread and butter pickles is the secret ingredient for our egg salad recipe.

Filling out the form online, I was thinking there would be a rental fee for the plot, but I never saw anything about rent.  I looked at that the plots that were left and chose a plot that was nearest to the water spigots.  My thinking was so we didn’t have to buy more hoses just to get the water to our plot.  Then I read the 22 rules, of which one rule was we couldn’t sell any of our produce.  Last, I had to give my license plate number and car description and we were all signed up.

I found out that the community garden the plot, the mulch and the water are free.  Our ‘free garden has probably costed us over $500 so far.  We had to fence our 25 ft x 100 ft plot because of the deer and rabbits.  We also had to buy seeds, different bags of soil and starter kits to start our plants indoors.  I already had a grow light.  So, Farmer Nancy’s plant nursery was started.  When they got bigger, I transplanted them to bigger pots and they went into my little greenhouse on the porch.  

My husband helped a lot as I recycled his used Starbucks cups for transplanting.   I poked holes in the bottom for drainage and now it was ready for my babies, as I call them.   Everything I look at now seems to have a new purpose.  It is amazing how much you can reuse from your everyday waste.  Milk jugs and 2-liter bottles are now self-watering my cherry plants that are in huge pots on the patio.  

My husband started calling me ‘Farmer Nancy’, but that is not new to me as I was called this as a teenager.  This is the history part of the story.  I have always loved vegetable gardening.  My mom and her parents were always gardening and canning.  I know I learned from them as I applied what I learned as a teenager and started working on Mr. Dunihue’s garden.   

Mr. Dunihue was in his late 80’s when I started gardening in his yard.  It was not fancy and I dug the garden with a spading fork.  I also remember planting Kentucky pole beans along the chain-linked fence down his driveway.  Our yard was separated from Mr. Dunihue’s yard by a fence and, back then, I was very athletic and would hop over the fence.  I fondly remember how, when I would do this, our other neighbor, Mr. Diebold, would say ” There goes Farmer Nancy”.

Over the years, I always had a small garden, but this is the first time I have ever done gardening on such a large scale.  So, when we were accepted for our plot, I started researching how our garden will be.  I decided on companion planting, like how basil plants do well with tomatoes, French marigolds are good attracting pollinators and repelling bugs like nematodes. There was a centuries-old Indian method called ‘3-sisters’ where you first plant the corn in a mound then, after the corn is at least 6 inches, you plant the pole beans and then follow up with squash. 

The corn needs a lot of nitrogen, and the beans gives nitrogen to the corn and the squash will keep the weeds down.  So, I drew my garden on graph paper and printed all my research for my garden book including the County Extension Office book about insects and treatments.  

One last thing we had to do is name plot 524.  On Mother’s Day, my kids gave me a present of getting the fence up and while together we decided our plot name would be “Pickle Patch”  after the whole reason for starting this venture.