I’ve wanted a potager since sometime in my very late teens. (Not a normal thing for a teenager to decide they want to do, I know.) After my grandma, a prolific gardener, died when I was 20, I started a garden on the side of my parents’ house. It was never very coherent, though, and I abandoned it after a couple of years because I was spending most of my gardening time with the then-boyfriend. (I was too unformed and uninformed then to realize that your partner should support your projects and dreams, not drag you away from them.) And then I worked a bunch and went to grad school and lived in little apartments and didn’t really garden at all, except for in my kitchen window. I did fairly well with that little window, though, and kept a carnivore garden going the whole time we lived in Minnesota:
I also grew basil there for a bit, but mostly I just grew plants. And that was enough for the time being. Now I have a house and a yard. We both cook constantly, and I need some form of manual labor to balance out my job. And I just plain missed gardening. So I started an herb garden on the deck back in May. The housesitter did a great job of keeping it alive while we were gone, and since we’ve been back home it’s been producing really well. (No more $2.99 bundles of herbs for us, at least until frost!) There, we have both Thai and sweet basil, two kinds of chives, cilantro, rosemary, oregano, thyme, sage, dill, spearmint, and a couple kinds of strawberries. I water every morning and we cook from it at least twice a day.
Over the week surrounding the 4th, I had nine yards of topsoil and compost hauled in, along with two yards of hardwood mulch. It took about a week to haul it all around to the back of the house (and thank God Justin and Wade hauled the very last of it, because that final yard just kept replenishing itself every time my back was turned.) At the end of it, the east garden bed has been stripped and regraded, and we have a kitchen garden just out the basement walk-out. The long bed and side bed are waiting until next year for tilling and planting, but I’ve started growing things in the raised beds now: Early Girl tomato, a Black Russian cherry tomato, Patio tomato, 3 more Thai basil plants, a row of scallion seeds, and 70 basil seedlings that I got for $10 at the Regional Market. (They’ll have to be thinned, but such delicious thinning it will be!)
This makes me very happy. And more relaxed, and also more productive. When I hit a hard space with the research, it’s easy to bang down a couple of flights of stairs, step out the basement door, and mess around in the garden for a bit. It’s fairly private down there, so the neighbors don’t see me muttering to myself the way they would if I was working in the front yard. And pretty soon, my head is clear and I’m back upstairs in my study, tapping away at the keyboard.
I’m not counting this goal as done, because it’s still very much in progress and the space really isn’t operationalized yet. But I feel really good about the way it’s coming along.
