The Most Enjoyable Part of Gardening for Me

Bob Bauer

May 07, 2017 (Last Updated: March 06, 2023) | Reading Time: 1 minutes

May 07, 2017

The most enjoyable part of gardening for me is the discovery. Like today I discovered two marble sized tomatoes on one of my Early Girl plants. I also found a 3" zucchini behind a blossom, and a tiny broccoli head. On the down side another cauliflower fell over with a chewed up stem. There were both ants and pill bugs at it's base..

I think they have teamed up against me. Everything made it through the frost last night, I guess Jack hasn't gotten the memo about the hardyness zone change. Having started everything too early I'm fortunate to have so much remaining. The newly seeded melon are actually growing, so I can hope they will be able to fend off the insects this time around..

May 08, 2017

Chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides are a quick fix for what ails your garden, but repeated applications will kill the microbes in your soil. Plants rely on microbes to break down organic matter into substances they can ingest. Hampering their role in decomposition will require you to use more fertilizer to get the same results, which will further destroy their effectiveness. Organic methods are slower to manifest, but endure from season to season, as nature intended..

Learning to use natural substances to enhance the effectiveness of your soil becomes enjoyable when the results are obvious and lasting. Gardening with nature fulfills an inherent quest for understanding the complex interactions and relationships of our environment..

May 09, 2017

We gardeners, especially organic ones, tend to think that we are working with nature to produce a bountiful harvest. When you consider how many of the vegetables we are trying to grow are non native species, it just isn't so. We are actually trying to manipulate our invironment, in defiance of nature, to achieve our goals. We trick the plants into producing in an environment where they normally wouldn'tÃ¢ÂÂ..

The soil we work with is not the soil that will give us the highest yield, so we amend it with microbe beneficial material, to produce more. Mother nature had this wet winter for the sow bugs, slugs and fungus to thrive, and I had to fight against her to get half a crop. If I didn't manipulate my environment contrary to her wishes I would have gotten none..

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