Rosalind
Deeply Rooted
Oh my. Does it count as gardening if it's just your chores every time the adults want some grownup time?
Most people we knew and most of my family had either a farm or a veggie/fruit garden. Whenever my parents wanted to visit someone, and wanted to talk about grownup stuff (which was almost always, they weren't that interested in kid stuff), they'd send me out to the garden to weed or pick something.
When I was six, one of my mother's boyfriends showed me how to garden properly. He made some raised beds for me in his yard and we planted a bunch of seeds, just the easy generic stuff you can grow in any old suburban lot. My mother broke up with him a couple of years later, but I kept up with buying tomato and herb seeds and planting them in a side yard. Kept that up until I was a teenager, when we moved to a house that had only woodlot around it, no open space and virtually no sunlight at all. I tried to plant something close to the house where the trees were thin, but the invasive weeds killed it and I couldn't hack the poison ivy back fast enough. I switched to container gardening and kept nothing more than houseplants and tea herbs for several years through college.
When DH went to college, we finally found a house to rent where we were allowed to have a garden in the yard. I planted one, and we were just getting the first peas when our landlady called to say that she had sold the house to a guy who was buying it for his daughter, so she wouldn't have to stay in the dorms--and we had 30 days to get out.
Found yet another house where we were allowed to have a small garden in the backyard, and it was wonderful the first year, got plenty of strawberries, greenbeans, flowers, herbs, it was just lovely. The second year, there was a giant blackout over Ohio, other parts of the Midwest, and a substantial portion of the Northeast. My veggie patch got squashed by emergency electrical repair trucks, the trellises smashed to bits and everything. They drove right through the neighbor's fence and above-ground pool, too--and they had a perfectly good easement through a back alley that they just didn't feel like using, if that tells you anything about FirstEnergy Electrical Corporation, may they rot in heck.
Went back to a few houseplants (orchids, cacti) after that. Then in 2006 when we were house shopping, we had it as one of our criteria that the house had to be on a minimum of 2 acres. In the bedroom communities around Boston, this is nigh-on impossible, but we found a couple of 'em and bought the one that sat on ex-farmland. It only provided one easement to wildlife scientists who worked on the neighboring nature preserve, and there was no reason at all for any utility truck to go in our yard, ever, without our permission. It had many trees but also a good portion of nice open yard that was just begging to be made into a veggie garden. Also, the seller had cleared part of the woodlot as a horse paddock for his horse, and there was plenty of, uh, fertilizer available. There were many mature bushes and trees that needed some rehabilitation with clippers, shears and the chainsaw to make them presentable, so I have a nice lilac hedge and lots of forsythias around, plus some great big sugar maples that I can tap in early March. There's a 100y.o. golden chain tree in the backyard and a very very old (don't know how old exactly) oak in the woodlot that will be getting some TLC in the spring. Last year, waiting to see what surprises we would get in the spring was incredibly exciting.
Most people we knew and most of my family had either a farm or a veggie/fruit garden. Whenever my parents wanted to visit someone, and wanted to talk about grownup stuff (which was almost always, they weren't that interested in kid stuff), they'd send me out to the garden to weed or pick something.
When I was six, one of my mother's boyfriends showed me how to garden properly. He made some raised beds for me in his yard and we planted a bunch of seeds, just the easy generic stuff you can grow in any old suburban lot. My mother broke up with him a couple of years later, but I kept up with buying tomato and herb seeds and planting them in a side yard. Kept that up until I was a teenager, when we moved to a house that had only woodlot around it, no open space and virtually no sunlight at all. I tried to plant something close to the house where the trees were thin, but the invasive weeds killed it and I couldn't hack the poison ivy back fast enough. I switched to container gardening and kept nothing more than houseplants and tea herbs for several years through college.
When DH went to college, we finally found a house to rent where we were allowed to have a garden in the yard. I planted one, and we were just getting the first peas when our landlady called to say that she had sold the house to a guy who was buying it for his daughter, so she wouldn't have to stay in the dorms--and we had 30 days to get out.
Found yet another house where we were allowed to have a small garden in the backyard, and it was wonderful the first year, got plenty of strawberries, greenbeans, flowers, herbs, it was just lovely. The second year, there was a giant blackout over Ohio, other parts of the Midwest, and a substantial portion of the Northeast. My veggie patch got squashed by emergency electrical repair trucks, the trellises smashed to bits and everything. They drove right through the neighbor's fence and above-ground pool, too--and they had a perfectly good easement through a back alley that they just didn't feel like using, if that tells you anything about FirstEnergy Electrical Corporation, may they rot in heck.
Went back to a few houseplants (orchids, cacti) after that. Then in 2006 when we were house shopping, we had it as one of our criteria that the house had to be on a minimum of 2 acres. In the bedroom communities around Boston, this is nigh-on impossible, but we found a couple of 'em and bought the one that sat on ex-farmland. It only provided one easement to wildlife scientists who worked on the neighboring nature preserve, and there was no reason at all for any utility truck to go in our yard, ever, without our permission. It had many trees but also a good portion of nice open yard that was just begging to be made into a veggie garden. Also, the seller had cleared part of the woodlot as a horse paddock for his horse, and there was plenty of, uh, fertilizer available. There were many mature bushes and trees that needed some rehabilitation with clippers, shears and the chainsaw to make them presentable, so I have a nice lilac hedge and lots of forsythias around, plus some great big sugar maples that I can tap in early March. There's a 100y.o. golden chain tree in the backyard and a very very old (don't know how old exactly) oak in the woodlot that will be getting some TLC in the spring. Last year, waiting to see what surprises we would get in the spring was incredibly exciting.
