Gardening for Fun and Fun

Amidst parenting, reading about Japanese Buddhist History, and transitioning jobs, I have had some time under lockdown to take up a new pursuit: vegetable gardening!

My family and I have almost 0 gardening experience, and no real luck or understanding of how it works, but I’ve always longed to turn a small plot around our home (which basically does nothing but grow weeds all day)¹ into something more creative. But I also expected to fail miserably so I decided to start small. I had some scrap wood (but no nails sadly), so I cleared a very small patch and just put together a small gardening box here.

Then, I bought some seedlings from the local Safeway and only later did I realize that these were pole bean plants. Here’s day one:

I decided to just use rocks to prop up the box, which for such a small garden works fine. Later I will build a proper box for garden 2.0. At this point, I just used some old potting soil to fill up the garden, and plant the sprouts. As you can see, the seedlings had grown somewhat, but can’t support themselves.

So, I grabbed some bamboo skewers and tried to prop them up:

This lasted for a few days, until I realized that this setup wasn’t very stable. So, I took more bamboo skewers, tied the top with some of my wife’s sewing thread, into a basic “teepee”-style setup:

This proved a lot more stable, but I didn’t make enough “teepees”, so some of the plants quickly fell off. The plants that are propped on the skewer tents have been growing pretty quickly and now grow over the skewer, which means I need taller trellises to support them:

I’ll post more as the garden prospers (or not). I can’t imagine this tiny garden will yield many beans, but if it bears any fruit, I will be thrilled. As someone who spent his life growing up in one cheap apartment complex after another, being able to tend a garden is a new, exciting experience and my hope is that this small garden will give me more valuable experience for future gardening ventures. 😎

¹ To be honest, I also like to leave the weeds there as a place for bees, hummingbirds and other small fauna to thrive. It probably doesn’t make me look good in the eyes of my wealthy neighbor next door and their sculpted garden (and its cadre of hired help), but I kind of take pride in it. Yes, I do maintain the yard, but I like to let things grow naturally when reasonable.