For years Kyle and I have been talking about starting a garden. It’s a little hard to garden when you’re driving thousands of miles each summer though. I suppose we could have put a plant on the dashboard of the jeep, but gardening just didn’t seem very practical when we travelled so much each summer. The idea was on the “that’d be nice, but…” list, along with things like seeing family for Thanksgiving, being able to eat endless amounts of ice cream without stomach problems, and having a fancy schmancy jet boat to take us up all the rivers and lakes around Bristol Bay. Nice, but not so practical.
In the beginning of April we started seeing a flyer around town. Beginner Gardening Class! After we had seen it at the post office, the school, and both stores, I brought up the idea to Kyle.
“What do you think about this gardening class?” I asked.
“Hmm, What’s it all about? Is it going to be worthwhile?” he responded.
“I don’t know. But it looks like it really covers the basics, so it might be good,” I noted.
Ever the agreeable one, Kyle said that “If you think it’s a good idea, we’ll do it.”
We got signed up and spent a whole weekend learning about gardening basics. Some things were a bit over our heads (soil chemistry), bu
t other things from the class were just perfect. My takeaway from the weekend was that gardening can be as complicated or simple as you want it to be. If you want you can get your soil tested, do soil amendments, till your whole yard, constantly weed, and attend to your garden as a full time summer job. Or you can plant some things in the ground and some in containers and just see what takes. The second route is where we decided to start. Even though we decided to take the easy route, we were still fairly nervous.
Luckily, as a part of our class we planted seeds and also worked on transplanting. All of the seeds and transplants we then took home. This made it much less intimidating to start gardening, after all, the plants were already there and growing, we just had to take care of them.
We left the seedlings inside in a sunny area for a few weeks. Amazingly, they started to get bigger. So then we found some pots in the shed and transplanted the seedlings. The plants looked pretty unhappy right after transplanting day, but most bounced right back within a day or two. Eventually the snow melted and the temperatures got warmed, so the plants moved outside. Surprisingly, they are still continuing to grow and thrive. We actually have so many plants thriving in some pots that we’ll have to thin them out! Now, we’re just anxiously staring at the garden waiting for the plants to get big enough for us to eat them.
So impressive!