Victory garden? More like resistance garden.

Tim had a plan for a garden even before we moved out here. He had grandiose plans, he wanted to start large and get even bigger.

Side note: I read somewhere when doing research on starting the yarn store I used to own with two friends, that more businesses started by women do better in the first five years than businesses started by men. This is because women have a tendency to start small, even if dreaming big, and add on the things to get them to that big point as they can afford it. Men more jump in, doing everything at once, and tend to just try to get more loans to cover things. I’ve thought about that a lot in the last twenty years!

Anyway. Gardens.

Tim had marked off about five acres here, for just the vegetable garden. Then he had about another acre he wanted to put fruit trees on. Then he had this really wild plan to dig a root cellar (!!!) and do mushrooms in it. And so on. He would endlessly draw out diagrams of where he wanted things. But he kept not starting, and not starting… and then maybe two years before he died, he finally started on a two year plan to plant cover crops to add nutrients to our sandy soil. He never got any farther than that. He would even talk about getting a booth at a Farmer’s Market to sell excess vegetables (even when he didn’t have any vegetables yet! Why are men like this?!?!?). I mean, I loved that he had dreams and I 100% supported his efforts. I did try to ask him things like… fencing, maybe? To keep out the deer? His answer was that he was going to plant SO MUCH that the deer wouldn’t be able to eat it all. I KNOW. Sigh. City boy.

So now *I* have a plan, and I’m sorry, Tim, but it’s not nearly as big as yours. I’m taking like maybe a quarter of an acre, Jeff’s going to fence it in for me, and I’m going to fill it with three or four raised beds, a handful of fruit trees (at least three loquats and two oranges), and my wooden swing. And a small greenhouse for starting seeds, and hopefully some greens I can grow year round for the tortoises.

Have you ever heard of Victory Gardens? In the early days of WW I and II, people were encouraged to start vegetable gardens at home. This would free up resources to go to people in combat, and would make it easier for people to get fresh vegetables locally if transportation that would be used to move food was being used instead to move troops. They were usually very simple, small gardens, focusing on root crops, seasonal vegetables, and vegetables that could be stored for long times without rotting.

Mine will be like that, but more like… for civil disobedience. Not for Victory. I suspect things are going to be really rough for a lot of people for more than the next couple of years. If I can help some of my friends in just a tiny way, by giving away bags of peppers and eggplants and oranges? Or by giving them a raised bed of their own that they can come out and care for, maybe use it to teach their children about food and how it grows? That would make me feel good.

Also, I don’t trust that people who don’t live in close contact with where their food comes from understand what’s about to happen… that kicking every single migrant out of the country means that a lot of crops are going to rot in the fields. Hint: they’re not stealing your job when that job is backbreaking labor in the hot sun with no bathrooms and little water and almost no money – a job that you would turn your nose up at doing. So I’m reasonably sure that the price of food is going to keep going up, as it has the last few years. If I can offset that cost by supplementing with my own fruits and veggies? Yes, please.

So. My plans…? For my Rebel Resistance Garden? My Garden of Civil Disobedience?

I’ve already ordered an outdoor compost tumbler, it should be here Monday. Meanwhile, I’ve also found, cleaned, and ordered new charcoal for an old kitchen compost bucket that I used to use years ago when I had a small garden in the back yard of my Gainesville house. Collect in the house, add to the tumbler once a week, turn the tumbler every few days, in a few weeks start getting compost. Because Tim was right 0 the soil here is going to have to be given some love to be anything but sand! I wonder if Black Kow can be delivered by the truckload….? Kidding. Sort of.

I do still have to narrow down what sort of raised bed I want. Tim built me the wooden ones we had at the Gainesville house. I have a friend who built hers from scratch… I’m not quite that talented. I’m looking at Vego raised beds (modular metal ones, and they also sell greenhouses), Cedar Planters by Earth Elevated (tall cedar planters on legs), or maybe Epic Gardening ones (they have both metal ones like Vego *and* raised cedar ones). I’d love to make up my mind and get them ordered by the end of January, so… if you see me in person and I randomly start talking about metal vs cedar in my garden, just smile and nod. I want to buy three or four of them, but probably only start out using two – prepping the other two for a later planting and taking time to get more nutrients into the soil. Why buy four if I’m only going to use two right now? So that I can go ahead and get them all at once and not have to worry about it in the Fall. Then, also, if any of my friends want to come out and have a little space, I have something for them.

Oh! The greenhouse! I mean, OBVIOUSLY I want something large and beautiful like what I saw at the Botanical Garden in Dublin…

… but actually I’d settle for something small and cheap that I could dress up over a couple of years by replacing cheap siding with old windows I can source off of Facebook Marketplace, or from the Repurpose Project. You know. If I can’t find an inexpensive, three story, iron and glass monstrosity that covers about two acres, haha.

OK; it’s late, this is already just at a thousand words (and I know only about three people keep reading past that, hahaha, thanks, Mom, Sonya, and Aunt Gay, I love you!). The dogs are looking at me as if they don’t understand why I’m not already in bed. And I have to go look up some heirloom seeds before I toddle off to bed!

Good night friends, sleep well, visions of blackberries and all that.