Friday, May 24, 2013

Our first real garden was on the terrace above our house at Camp Zama, Japan.  We scratched a place to grow our vegetables and when they were replacing the windows in all the military housing, I co-opted some of the discards and built an 8x8x8 greenhouse.  The garden was largely unsuccessful because the soil just wasn’t great.  The jungle behind our house grew kudzoo into the treetops, but our soil was mostly what was left over after building the houses and the terrace walls, so peas and radishes and lettuce and not much more.  The town of Zama was largely agricultural and they grew huge daikon (a very large Japanese radish-like vegetable) just outside the base, but not so on our hill.  Doing the military move doesn’t lend itself to vegetable gardening because you are not on location long enough to develop the soil and build up a supply of compost, so the next time we grew a substantial garden was 8 or 9 years later in Ben Franklin Village outside of Mannheim, Germany.  We were fortunate to live in a duplex with a reasonable yard, and we set out early to put in a garden.  With shovel and rake and hoe and wheelbarrow, we removed the sod and turned the earth and found…..construction debris 50 years or so old.  It was impressive to dig up pieces of 2x4 that were still in reasonable shape after all that time.   To improve the soil, we decided we needed compost and I built a bin on the side of our gardening shed and put into it all of the leaves and grass clippings, watered liberally, and added fertilizer and soon we had a smoking-hot mix that degraded quickly into compost.  We added the compost to the soil which aerated it and nourished it and our garden took off.  We grew all of the standard vegetables, and I held a pumpkin-growing contest with each of the kids.  They all got to plant a pumpkin and baby it and on the pre-determined day, we picked the pumpkins and weighed them and ………somebody won.  I decided to hold another contest at the dental clinic.  The deal was that I would bring them a pumpkin and they would bring back pumpkin bread for taste-testing.  I supplied butter and milk and we ate a lot of delicious pumpkin bread.  And…..somebody won.  The only thing I remember is that the judges obviously didn’t have good taste, because MY bread was clearly the best, if not the winner.  We moved on from Germany in June of 2003 and left a garden at the brink of production.  We had to argue with the housing authorities that the garden was an asset and that the next tenants would surely appreciate it, and they finally gave up on their demands that we tear it out and resod the 15’x 30’ space.  Rebecca and Shawn, after they were married, traveled to Germany and stopped by to see our house.  The apple tree we planted was still there and producing apples, but the garden was gone.  When we built our new home here in Eagle River, AK, it took me a year or two to make a flat spot for a garden, but that finally happened.  The real problem was that our soil looks very much like rocks.  In fact, it is rocks.  Beverly ordered 6 dump truck loads of soil to hide the rocks with, but the soil still wanted nutrition.  We needed compost!  One day on the way home from work I noticed a lawn service truck parked on the street down the mountain a ways.  I stopped to talk to the boss about his grass clippings and he agreed to give my dump a try instead of paying for dumping at the landfill.  Jeff, the Lawn Lizard, began hauling his clippings and leaves up to my house and dumping them on the property.  I would push and pile and water the clippings and wait for them to compost, and eventually they did.  Jeff, who is a great guy, has continued to haul his yard waste to my pile and I continue to nurse it.  Today, I restacked the compost.  It is divided into 4 piles because it takes about 4 years for the lawn waste to become excellent compost.  Those many months of cold weather slow down the process considerably, but the wait is worth it.  Tomorrow I will compost the beds in the green house and the apple trees and the garden rows and then plant the seeds.  We have been waiting impatiently for weeks because the failure of global warming led to the most and latest snowfall here ever.  The starts we planted in the house in March are already producing cucumbers 6” long.  Last year the potatoes and carrots  and so on were great.  No pumpkins though.  The growing season is just too short.  Zucchini bread, anyone?