The beginning, continued

The seeds showed up in the mail, and I began planning the garden. I drew up a plan for the garden beds, calculated how much wood and chicken wire we'd need, consulted growing manuals to decide where to plant each of my mini-crops, and created an impossibly optimistic calendar for my summer. I set aside one week at the beginning of the summer to create the actual garden before I started my full-time summer job. I had decided on three 3x9 deeply dug raised beds, and immediately set about digging them. It was only 81 square feet, and I was (naïvely) convinced that I could knock that out of the way in one day, maybe two days at the outside. Ha! By the end of the first day, I had dug one puny 3x9 bed, removing three large rocks from soil in the process, and I was more exhausted and filthy than I had ever been in my life. Suffice to day, it took more than a week to build the new infrastructure, even with considerable help from my family, my dad in particular. That's perhaps my most valuable lesson I've gleaned from gardening so far: everything takes longer than you have any reason to think it will. Being on schedule is a great goal, but, at least for me, it is also very rare.

That summer, I leapt into vegetable gardening. I grew three kinds of tomatoes, tomatillos, spinach, string beans, two kinds of lettuce, two kinds of potatoes, hot peppers, and sweet peppers. Growing was just as much fun as I'd hoped it would be, and with an electric fence to keep the critters out, it seemed much more possible to grow actual food. I also grew a garden this past summer, with different vegetables: radishes, beets, carrots, kale, two chards, peas, four lettuces, potatoes, two string beans, three tomatoes, zucchini, and pumpkins. I was sad to leave my garden when it came time to go back to school, until I realized that I could have a garden out here.

For my school's community service requirement, I worked on the school's "farm," which at that time was 2 weedy, sandy acres behind the on-campus apartments. Mostly I turned the compost pile and weeded the one plot of produce crops, but they were also developing community plots for any students, faculty, or staff to rent by the semester. I now live in those on-campus apartments, and decided it was time to have a school garden, too. I am now the proud tenant of plot A4. 

However, that doesn't mean it's smooth sailing from here. I've never grown in Southern California before, and consequently am facing totally different challenges than the ones I've focused on in the Northeast. Climate, weather patterns, day length, pests, planting times are all different here. This is my attempt to muddle through it, and hopefully learn from other gardeners.