December 11, 2009

This is a first-time effort for me, maintaining a blog. More for my personal use than any other reason. It will be an account of my efforts at maintaining a garden-farm in central Wisconsin. Well, really just a largish garden of about 2500 sq. feet. I wish I could be a farmer, but we own only about 7 acres of which 5 1/2 are wooded and rocked (hence Rockwood Gardens), about 4000 sq. feet are in prairie gardens, the rest in lawn, driveways, house and shed. So gardens it will be along with some orchard trees (apples, plum, cherries, and pears). I'm hoping to also raise some chickens this summer for meat and eggs (and fun).

Why this effort? I'm a retired (and reformed) professor of economics from the local university. I retired in 2005 and my wife and I started gardening in the smallish giardino the previous property owner left us, about 600 sq. feet. I found that I actually enjoyed it. My wife had tried a garden about 6 years before, the first year we owned this property. The deer came in and ate just about everything down to the ground. So we fenced the S. garden and planted and enjoyed a nice harvest of corn, tomatoes, beans, peas etc.

In 2006 we planted again. And that year I bought a copy of Ed Smith's Vegetable Gardener's Bible (published by Storey). Excellent book and that fall I set up and double-dug garden beds in that giardino. Hell of a lot of work! But I finished it in late November just as the flakes started to fall from the first snowstorm of the season.

We planted similar crops in 2007 (but now including onions) and we also grew pumpkins and squash in a largish area west of our house. Again good harvests, muchly enjoyed. And during this time I was also learning about and reading widely in foodie and farming literature. Grew hooked on trying to be independent of supermarkets, absorbed the virtues of organic farming/gardening and the value of chemical-free foods.

You might ask why do you bother, when there are so many good foods available in a supermarket? I heard a number the other day, that there are about 50,000 different food items in the average supermarket among which to choose. Well, chemical-free foods appeal to me, and gardening also reduces our carbon footprint (the average food item in the U.S. travels around 1500 miles from field to fork; the standard number tossed around).

But I also liked the reply Paolucci gave when Ferenc Mate' asked "why he bothers with his vegetables and fruit. In all the years I've known him it was the only time I've ever seen him look at me with disappointment. He took a long slug of wine. 'There are lots of women out there,' he said, 'and lots of kids. Why bother having your own?' " (from The Wisdom of Tuscany, p. 139). Besides it is an delightful challenge and I enjoy working with my hands, seeing in the end something definite result from my efforts and enjoying the taste of my harvest.
That fall (in 2007) I defined some garden beds on the west side of the house where the squash and pumpkins had grown and began double-digging those beds. I didn't get that finished until early summer of 2008. [Winter and freezing temperatures are an interfering aspect of life in Wisconsin, you see.]

During summer of 2008, which was fairly dry for long periods, I spent much time out there watering by hand with a garden hose. Royal pain in the whazzoo! In 2009 I installed a drip irrigation systems which worked wonderfully well. More about that later. Grew several kinds of tomatoes and learned some lessons; separate post on that as well. Lovely experience growing onions also.

But in 2008, I also spent a lot of time with our small, toy tiller working over a large piece of ground, about 20 by 60 feet. I encountered a lot of tree roots which I then had to get out of the tiller. Also a lot of the weed and grass growth also had to disentangled. So it seemed like about every 20-30 minutes I would have to shut off the tiller and use my knife for a half-hour to 45 minutes to untangle the tiller blades. I also wound up pulling a lot of long, sturdy tree roots, some as long as 10-20 feet. So a lot of bending and pulling as well as bending and sitting with the tiller.

And then I encountered rocks, a lot of rocks. Most of them I could dig out, with some considerable effort because they were large and heavy. Some were VERY large and I had to spend hours working away at them with a sledge hammer and then shovel. I extracted several hundreds of pounds of rocks from the area. Even then, I had to let some rocks remain - they were just too large and too hard to deal with. The Wolf River batholith underlies our property. In the prairie garden just few feet south of this vegetable garden, we have large ricks sticking up out of the soil. I understand they are something like 1.5 billion years old! I have trouble wrapping my brain around such numbers.