Interview with a Gardener

The problem that is our food industry is a large and worrying one. The issues are innumerable. Over one third of food produced in the world for humans every year is wasted. Food packaging was the second most common item retrieved during annual beach clean ups by the Ocean Conservancy in 2018. And this isn’t even touching on the transportation costs to both individual consumer and the planet.

We simply cannot keep consuming in the ways that we currently do.

This has sparked the interest of some Americans towards growing their own fresh vegetables. It’s to either supplement, or completely replace, what they buy in stores. The work requires consistency and dedication, but the results can be bountiful and incredibly satisfying.

These are only some of the reasons why people make the decision to grow their own veg:

• No GMOs or pesticides
• No plastic
• No or very low transportation costs
• So fresh – straight from garden to table within minutes
• It can taste AMAZING

Today I spent some time with Steven. He's in his mid-20s and works shifts as an EMT. He has a lot of interest in lowering his overall cost of living, as well as reducing his carbon footprint. Growing his own food has become his new ‘thing’.

We talk in the car, on the way to his mum’s. I’m travelling with him to see how his new garden is doing. He tells me that he’d prefer to talk in the car; if I try to pin him down for a face-to-face he worries he’d get distracted or fidgety after 10 minutes or so.

We sit in his Mini, and coast through only a few of the small and homely towns which characterise the Massachusetts that’s beyond Boston. It’s early October. The wind is blustery but humidity is surprisingly high in the air. I struggle to balance my laptop on my knees but as a pay-off, his engagement in our conversation is on-point.

Caroline: What made you want to start your own garden?

Steven: I mean, I’ve always wanted to do a garden but I just had the perfect moment with my mum having a new place with a lot of land, and a family member moving out, facilitating planting a garden because she needed food. And now I’ve started, I just see everything else that could be done.

When did you plant your first vegetable?

My mum started a garden when I was little, and I would help her with it when I was five. I remember in high school, I was maybe 17 and I started a garden inside; I put them in a little box inside and I put tin foil on top so I could shine a light in, and it would reflect down on them. I started sunflowers, strawberries, cucumbers… that’s all I can remember. But I never put them outside and they just died.

Oh wait, my mum started cucumbers too, when I was 15 or 16, and she would bring them in for like a salad. But I didn’t like vegetables then, so I didn’t really eat them.

This year is the first year, and we started really late in August.

If I had known more about it before, I would have started it earlier, but I had other things I was doing. But it was actually perfect for the fall harvest, because any later and I wouldn’t have been able to do anything.

What do you have growing right now?

Um… onions (they’re very small), carrots (they’re very small too), cucumbers, zucchini, radishes (we’re on our second crop of those now, as we’ve already harvested one), kale, beets, lettuce, spinach and eggplants, which I don’t know why I did those, I guess it was just for sh*ts and giggles… because they’re tiny and they’re never gonna get anywhere…

Why’s that?

They’re warm weather; they grow like tomatoes. You need them really hot, like in the middle of summer.

And actually we started a bunch of herbs inside, we’ve started sage, basil, parsley, cilantro and thyme. And my mum already has a big rosemary plant going.

How much land would you say you need to start a good-sized garden?

You could start it on anything; you could do it on whatever size you’ve got.

You could do a raised garden that’s three feet by six feet or something, or you could do your entire backyard if you wanted… As long as you have the sun throughout I suppose.

Or some people do little pots or hanging baskets.

People do indoor hydroponic systems, which I’m going to look at over the winter, see if I can set that up. And that can take up no room at all, if you did it right.

What would you say has been your biggest challenge so far?

I guess, planning. That wasn’t very hard at the beginning. I guess in the future it’s going to be unforeseen stuff, like with the beets we just harvested that are all green and no beet. But when I looked it up, it said that too much nitrogen and not enough phosphorous will cause the beet not to grow big, so I guess next year I’ll go, “okay, I need to change that and have more phosphorous in the soil.”

But other than that, I guess it’s just the physical aspect, of digging up all the grass and the entire area, and getting all of the goddamn rocks out of the soil, because there are so many rocks. Also obviously just expanding the garden. Because right now I believe it’s 12ft x 25ft? Next year it’s gonna be 4m x 40m. So it’s gonna be f*cking way bigger.

Has anything gone not quite to plan, and what did you learn from it?

Honestly, everything is going far too smoothly. I suppose the fact that the beets didn’t work shows that there’s stuff to come. I’m sure I’ll pull up those carrots and they’ll be tiny baby carrots. I’m still happy because I harvested radishes and kale and they’re both f*cking delicious.

When I get into the more complicated plants, I’m sure there’ll be some stuff. I plan on just diving headfirst and seeing what happens.

Have you noticed variations in the same plants produced between different seeds?

I have; only in the kale and beets. The beets, out of the same packet, 80 percent of them are red, as a beet should be in my mind—and then some of them are yellow. They have completely green tops and yellow bottoms. I don’t know if it’s the seed dealer or what, but I don’t mind, it’s still delicious.

The kale was the craziest, there are like 5 different variations in there: some of them are big leaves, all green; some of them just have a green stem and veins; some are all purple stem and veins; some of them are really curvy; one of them is super flat. And they all came out of the same packet. But again, I don’t care, it’s just for me, they don’t need to be perfect.

Where do you get your information and guidance from?

I guess just different places on the internet. I’ve always followed things about living differently.

I took a horticulture class in high school, but I didn’t take a whole lot from that—just to be gentle when replanting, and that plants need nitrogen and phosphorous, and there was another one too…

A lot of it is looking up random info on the internet as it pops into my brain. I’d also like to say it’s common sense, like people should just kind of know how plants work. Like you plant them in the ground, you water them, you look after them…

You can get more complicated than that and you should, but I feel like that’s the hardest bit.

And I learned about doing furrows from just seeing gardens like that, and history class, with ancient agricultural techniques for drainage. So yeah, I just set up my garden.

How difficult is it to start a garden?

It’s not difficult at all. The most difficult thing is getting yourself to do the work if you don’t want to. Once you’re in it and you see stuff growing, you just want to keep going.

I guess it’s physically demanding—in tilling the earth, putting the fence around it, raking, and getting the furrows right, weeding. It’s not nearly the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

How much work does your garden take to maintain?

A few hours a week. You could probably get it down to six hours a week, once it’s up and going. You just need maybe 20, 30 minutes of watering, an hour or two of weeding. If you do a really good weed, they sort of come back less and less, it’s almost like they give up, and then it’s really easy. I weeded that garden like crazy maybe a month ago, then last week weeded it a little bit, now I’m not really seeing anything pop up, so.

Which veg have you grown which tastes the best?

I’d say the kale. Yeah, it tastes crazy. It tastes so much more ‘kale-y’, it just has such a deep flavour to it. If someone doesn’t like kale, have them eat freshly picked backyard kale. Also the radishes were awesome; the greens on them were so good.

I’m assuming everything is going to taste better [than shop bought], because even the lettuce tasted better.

How does it feel to eat food that you’ve grown yourself?

Amazing. It’s just like free food, you go out there and you pick it, you feel so connected to it. You don’t want to see it go to waste. It makes me sad to think of some of it going to waste, so I’m only picking what I’m going to eat. It also means I’m eating more greens because I just can’t see it go to waste—I’d be too sad.

You feel healthier too… I don’t know, obviously that’s like a placebo, although it probably is healthier. I don’t know, you just feel better, like damn, I’m eating some good sh*t.

Which months of the year do you plan to grow veg in?

In Massachusetts, this is a Zone 6A, so I believe our last frost is early May. So I’m going to start seeds indoors in the winter. I’m thinking of trying artichoke and leek, I’ve heard you start them in January, or even late December. And then I’ll do onions probably starting in February, then other stuff I’ll start indoors in March or April, and more then outdoors after.

I also want to do greenhouse tarp things over the furrows, bend metal poles over the mounds, then plastic over those. So I could put them out maybe early April, and they’d still be protected from frost, to try and extend the growing season.

You mentioned indoor hydroponic gardening. What else are you planning besides the veg garden at the moment?

The hydroponic gardening is just sort of like an idea. I always thought they’d be kind of fun, but it might be a pain in the a*s. I might try lettuce and strawberry over the winter, I’ve heard they’re popular at the moment.

I just bought mushroom spores. So I bought oyster mushroom, portobello spores and shiitake plugs. My mum just chopped down a tree out back, I think it’s hardwood, so I’ll wait a few weeks and drill some holes in it, plant the mushrooms, see how that does.

I don’t know how they’ll do over the winter, I guess that’ll just be some sort of an experiment. Because they’ll be outside, you know. But I won’t know until I try. I’ll probably do the portobellos in the basement in the winter. I just want to become a mushroom farmer because I’m a massive hipster I guess, I want to sell them at farmer’s markets.

What are your plans for the garden in the future?

I think it’d be really cool to be self-sustaining. I’ve always thought it would be cool to have a place where you don’t have to go out and buy things.

It’ll be a ton of work, and I’ll have to make sacrifices, like going without bread every week. If I get chickens, I’ll have eggs, and then I guess I’ll just be eating whole foods too. It’s definitely possible, people did it forever. A year would be a cool milestone, like wow I did this for a year, it’d be crazy.

Potatoes, I’d grow a ton of them, and carrots. I’d be looking into growing chickpeas too.

I guess the challenge would be that a lot of things I eat, that have high protein and high calories, would be a b*tch to process. Like lentils, they come in little pods, so a bag of lentils—how many pods would you have to go through? And to make bread, I’d have to dry the flour, mill it…

But I think it’d be fun. And I think it would give me a deep appreciation of what people have been doing forever. And for what somehow, nowadays, we’ve stepped away from. Most people won’t even think of growing their own stuff, and yet that’s what most people did for thousands of years. If it didn’t grow, you didn’t eat.

We step into Steven’s garden and I feel this weighty pressure to not accidentally step on any plants. I’m also impressed at what he has achieved in exchange for a few months’ work and learning largely on his own. I take a look at the tiny beets that never grew, and we cut various leaves together. He’s going to wash them, and split the takings with his mum.

I agree with Steven to interview him again in a few months’ time, to try and encapsulate what he learns and achieves moving forward.

I walk away feeling inspired by Steven’s efforts. And it got me to wondering—what would my ideal garden look like? What would I attempt to grow first? And how might I feel eating food that I had made all by myself?

How about you?