Finally, everything is in the ground. The garlic is growing well, and I've got potatoes, carrots, onions, beets, lettuce, tomatoes, corn, beans, squash, sunflowers, cucumbers, peppers, cantaloupe, watermelon, grapes, blackberries, elderberries, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, cherry trees, pear trees, apple trees, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, eggplant, celery, and peas in the ground now. And, as always, the rhubarb. Oh, and I just planted fifty pumpkin seeds this afternoon before the rain came down.
So, altogether, I've got thirteen fifty-foot rows, as well as a mounded area for the corn/beans/squash/ sunflower combo, four rectangular patches, and two rows for the fruit bushes and plants (not counting the trees). Not bad for our third year doing this.
Now comes the fun part: waiting, watching, and weeding. And killing potato bugs; that's almost an hour every single morning, just scraping bright orange eggs off the leaves. But it has to be done; I'd rather do that than spend two or more hours every day pulling full-grown bugs off the stalks after they've devoured all the potato leaves. This year, I'm going to win the fight. It's not perfect, but since we don't use pesticides or the like, it's the old-fashioned way. I'm working on some natural ways to beat them, but it really boils down to scraping off the eggs and grabbing any bugs that are still around to lay more.
And waiting them out isn't really an option; apparently, they can live a couple of years. So, I have to keep them from getting past the egg stage if I don't want them to overrun the row. I read last year that garlic was a good deterrent, but I'm realizing that I have to actually plant the potatoes in amongst the garlic to keep the bugs from getting at the potatoes; the garlic is in surrounding rows, twenty-four or so inches between the closest garlic and potato plants. So, it's not close enough to have any effect.
And so, after I feed the animals every morning, I spend time on the potatoes. The rest of the weeding can wait until later in the day, since my fifty-two-year-old back isn't up to doing more than that early in the morning. And the rest of the garden isn't really that bad, anyway; the weeds are pretty well contained so far. The grass, however, is annoying. To a gardener, grass is a weed. To a lot of college students, too, but that's a different kind of grass.
So, why do this? I live on an island that is literally the potato capital of the world, where potatoes are cheaper than air in some places. Why spend all this time growing some myself, when we can just buy them at the store? And I don't even like eating potatoes that much; I can't eat them mashed due to the texture, and other than fried, I rarely touch them. So, why go through all of this?
Because, like everything else we are growing, this is OUR food. We know what's going into it, and we know what's coming out. No chemicals, no sprays, no genetically-modified weird stuff. Fresh, healthy, natural food. That is the entire point of doing this. And with the latest news that synthetic, lab-grown meat is being rolled out for public testing in California, it's even more important that we do this. I sure as hell don't trust something grown in a lab, not after what the world went through over the past three years.
So, I'll continue this morning routine until I see no more bugs and no more eggs. And this time, I'm going to win the potato bug war. There may be casualties (my back, my legs, my sanity...), but that's the price to be paid when waging a war to the bitter end. And the reward at the end of it all? Real food, the way God intended it to be. That's worth it.
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