If you have been tracking our family projects, you might remember the gardening project we undertook this year. As summer is fading into fall, we wanted to look back on our gardening experiment and share some of the lessons we learned from our experience.

The Method
At the beginning of the year we chose to use the Square Foot Gardening method espoused by Mel Bartholomew. The advantages are good soil, few weeds, small size, and support for multiple plant types. Many levels of difficulty exist for square foot gardening, but we chose one of the most basic for our first year, attempting to maximize our chances of success. We planted tomatoes, carrots, lettuce, spinach, celery, broccoli, black-eyed peas, green beans, cucumbers, and many different kinds of flowers.

The Results
I believe we have eaten some of almost every type vegetable or fruit planted. They all produced, but with varying degrees of success. The green-beans, tomatoes, carrots, lettuce, and spinach performed well. The peas, celery, and cucumbers did ok, but not great, and the broccoli was a complete failure. Pesky cabbage worms destroyed the broccoli no matter how many of them we killed.

The garden produced as advertised with few weeds, very little upkeep, and great plant growth. Keep in mind that we started most everything from seed!

Lessons Learned

Start small. I am glad we did not try to tackle more space or higher difficulty models like continuous harvest or seed starting indoors the first year.

Choose “how” and “why”. Square foot gardening fit our time and energy requirements. A small traditional garden with all the weeding involved might not have. And this was an experiment, not meant to feed all of our family’s needs, so we planted accordingly.

More Space. Plants need more room than we thought. The tomatoes and the cucumbers grew quickly, and achieved impressive size. Unfortunately, they shaded nearby plants which needed the sun. The beans suffered from this lack of light, but lesson learned. Next year, more space.

Critical mass. Be sure to plant enough to harvest for a meal. The black-eyed beans did not produce enough of a crop at a time to give us a helping for a meal.

Watch and listen. Some crops exceeded our expectations. Others did not. Guess which ones we are going to repeat next year? Yep. The ones that did well. Tomatoes, green-beans, cucumbers, lettuce, and spinach were all winners. Black-eyed peas, celery, and broccoli were losers. The losers will not be planted or we will find another variety. And I imagine we will add a few more unknowns to next year’s crop so we can find a few more winners.

Flowers. The flowers kept the garden cheerful, even when things were not in bloom. Just make sure you know how tall the flowers will really get. We had some six footers that pretty much shaded the other flowers. They were beautiful and the butterflies loved them, but I could have used some better variety.

Finally, a few things they don’t tell you in the gardening books:

Hand a child a seed, he’ll plant it… somewhere. Andrew found a random sprout of moonflower in a half empty pot of dirt. Sam planted the “magic seed.”

Nobody loves your garden like you do. Leaving it in the hands of others can be fatal.

Working in the garden seems to contribute to the intestinal workings of little boys. Be prepared for the “gardening stench” and I don’t mean fertilizer.

Nothing builds the bond between father and son like “helping” water the garden every morning. Every child sho

Do you remember in Genesis 1:28 where God tells Adam and Eve to fill the earth and subdue it? When we returned from vacation, I found out why God told these first two people to subdue the earth. If you don’t, the grass, weeds, vines, etc, will take over your house and move in!

When we returned from vacation, I groaned when we pulled up the driveway. While we were on vacation enjoying sand, sun, and family, every plant back home had a mission to grow as big as possible in all the wrong places. What’s more, they could devote all day and night to this horrible mission impossible. I’ll give it to them: they succeeded beyond my imagination.

I have flower beds of grass that were empty when we left. I have weeds where grass was growing not a week ago. Our grass is tall enough to make hay, and the weeds are even taller.

So this evening after the kids were safely (and quietly) in bed, I set to work mowing the grass and starting to put things back in order. It was a good feeling, despite the stifling heat and the sweat soaking my clothes. Perhaps that sounds a bit sadistic to many of you, but the truth is that for every row or two that I mowed, I felt like I was taking some control back. There remains much grass to mow, many weeds to pull, and a few plants to nurse back to health, but the small dent feels good.

Dominion is hard, often sweaty, and sometimes dangerous, but I’m finding it is also fulfilling and necessary. God seems to not only give me the direction, but I must remember that he is also my creator. He knows how I am wired, and how I will best function. While I am hoping that taking dominion does not always require weeds, I am heartened that the God who made me is also the God who directs me and delights in my obedience. Even with weeds.

Blessings,
Andrew

We can at last say that we have harvested the “fruits of our labors.” Well, green beans aren’t fruit, but close enough. We’ve got quite a few green beans still on the vine, waiting to be picked. And so many cucumbers growing we can’t count. But I picked my first one yesterday. Now, anyone got any pickling recipes? Or good ways to can green beans?

For all of you who are keeping an eye on our garden, here’s your update. We’ve had a bunch of rain here (I’m talking ark-worthy) and the garden has grown like gang-busters. We’ve got tons of little bitty cucumbers behind the yellow blossoms on the plant. The cucumber plants are taller than the trellis now. We’ve got green beans almost ready to harvest in a week. And everything else seems to be doing well. Except… for the broccoli. The caterpillars got it. We’ve decided to admit defeat. At first, we thought we could pick them off and minimize the damage. But while we won a few battles, the caterpillars won the war. Which is a bummer, because I really wanted to see what broccoli looked like in the ground. Oh well. If all we lose is one vegetable, I’d say we’re still pretty successful. Truthfully, even if we harvest nothing, watching the boys help Daddy water the garden every morning was well worth every minute.