How Does Your Garden Grow? (part one)

Purple Hyacinth Bean Vine

My 2022 gardening season officially began a couple of weeks ago when I opened my contract in the mail! This will be the fourth consecutive season to have a plot in a community garden that is, luckily, just a few blocks from my residence! It was in my seventh year of living downtown (this stint) with no green space that I was invited to join but didn't for fear of being trapped by a bona fide stalker who had resurfaced (years prior he was arrested in my living room while he was strangling me), and I didn't want to put anyone else in harms way. 

Gonna eat a lot of peaches!

The following year I got brave enough to join, and I quickly found such an urban getaway to be an absolute oasis. Clearing out the winter debris is a fast exercise of progress, and when spring produces its leaves to fill in the trees, the garden becomes so lush it is all but hidden in plain sight. 

 My first time growing Buttercrunch Bibb lettuce!

Living downtown for so long, in an area void of any trees for most of that time, a heat island, means being surrounded by a landscape of buildings, sidewalks, streets, and traffic lights. To juxtapose the hardness of the concrete and the other parts of life that can be as unequally unforgiving, for anyone, it is really nice to have a space to be soft.

  

Inherited established gladiolas in my first plot!

As a city dweller and trauma survivor who is always on guard, I didn't know how much I needed the softness but could sense it; a space where I can enter, lock a gate behind me, and move through beauty, eating peaches from a tree, practically undetected by any passersby.

My first time growing broccoli!

I relish in the newfound connection to green space. Rarely do I use gloves when I'm gardening because I love getting dirty, working barehanded in the dirt and connecting with nature, a practice called Earthing. There are therapeutic benefits for everyone who is able to get in touch with nature, and it is incredibly cathartic, after decades of city life, for me to truly reconnect to the earthy, hippie, country gal within. It puts me in touch with my roots - and my ancestors.

I LOVE BEETS!

Our Spirit Guides might scream to redirect course before we heed their warnings. Maladaptive coping can sever layers of our connections and trap us within ourselves. It's like we hibernate our minds and, maybe, let our hearts and souls slip into darkness, too. It feels like its own eternity and, sadly, will become that for some. But if we're lucky, we will start listening and claw our zombie asses out of the caves and away from the chains trauma binds in our minds. 

It's like when Earth begins awakening from its Winter slumber, we humans as a whole are slowly enlivened, too, with the first stages - air warming, grasses greening, flowers blooming, and trees budding. In the city you see more people, more skin and more noise pollution. (Looking at you, Revving Engines.) Against the bleak, empty, and dormant landscape, time is marked by renewal and increasing light that, if we look with willing hearts, reveals particles of hope hidden in the dust clearing right in front of our eyes. 

Baby Broccoli Love

With so much coming back to life and the essence of energies grounding and rooting, I will not be the first person who makes notation of the parallels between seasons and souls! It is easy for even the jaded to feel intoxicated by fresh hope.

That I'm not wearing black says everything!

In the first years as a member of the garden community, the plot I worked got some early morning sun and a lot of shade. It gave shade, too. Tomatoes always with the clap back! They never did well, and, yes, I kept trying. Insanely. If they did produce a nice looking fruit, slicing it open would, by and large, expose disease. Mildew in the shade? Tomato blight? Not surprising. 

Look at that rich soil!

Eventually, I had to remove and carefully dispose of large sections of plants. It was an extraordinary amount of work for a yield that was next to nothing. However, the cucumbers did really well! So well, in fact, that I repeatedly missed picking them and many died on the vine. The trials and errors of gardening take some time to learn, just like the trials and errors in life.  

One view of the tomato situation.

One of those lessons is, with more emotional intellect, those of us who struggle with doing the right thing, for ourselves, can realize we are sabotaging our happiness and stop holding ourselves back, which is often connected to false equivalency of holding ourselves accountable.

With a dear friend of 25 years!

Trauma survivors often blame themselves or bury themselves in a hole dug out by survivor's guilt. The impulses that create these behaviors speed along neural super highways. It is hard to knock them off track and even harder to shut down the highway and create healthy ones, but it is possible. 

Lil' piggy and butterfly courtesy of my papa.

To my credit, despite twice planting tomatoes in a shaded area, I did try new methods or added new variables so that I wasn't completely wackadoodle in my efforts. Finding new approaches to solve ongoing problems will usually produce a resolution to them. For example, I thought to start watering in the morning, rather than in the evening. This was not my first gardening experience. I knew it to be better to water in the mornings because daytime allows for more drying as opposed to nighttime, which can get too wet, and to avoid watering midday as to avoid scorching. It's usually best to avoid leaves, altogether.

My first time growing celery, too!

I watered in the evening because I figured it was better than not watering at all, or enough, which were unfortunate likelihoods. The optimal solution for watering my garden required more early morning effort than my second shift worker manageable-to-me routine of morning coffee at home with a watering can on my terrace. True for any endeavor we undertake, we are necessarily inclined to work with our lifestyles and limitations. Watering in the evening was a better fit for me for a few reasons, including that I did not want to be anywhere but home in the early morning.

 

A fairy friend watering late into the night.

Besides changing my watering routine, my other remedy was to put straw down around the base of my plants. The barrier would protect them from mud splashing up as I had painstakingly removed the roots of anything I did not want growing there; awesome except for it left bare dirt that turned to mud when I watered heavily, which I did depending on weather and/or if I knew I couldn't be there the next night. When we remove the weeds from our lives, we can better insure the benefits of our work by filling in that space with what our soul gardens need. If we don't put down a wholesome buffer between the fruits of our efforts and the weeded dirt, either our sustenance dries up or mud splashes up on us when it rains.

Here I am cooling off on a hot evening!

In addition to being a mud barrier, straw is also excellent bedding for moisture control and prevent the growth of weeds (that might remain or be seeded).  Although this would never be able to account for the lack of direct sun past early afternoon, the sunlight seemed just enough to bear some fruit - not ideal or particularly good. They were visually passable, though, kind of like someone who seems like they're all together on the outside but aren't doing well on the inside. Straw, although not emitting sunlight, was an excellent plan to mitigate dampness. I brought in a bale of straw mid-season. Here is where things go awry.

TO BE CONTINUED...