“The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just the body, but the soul.” - Alfred Austin
Though I grew up in the ‘Garden City’ of India, I had no particular affinity for plants. My family had always lived in apartments, and we didn’t grow anything. Even in the USA, I didn’t dare to grow anything when we were renting. It’s only when we bought our first home 8 years ago that I braved and took the plunge. This home had two yards, but both were covered in concrete! Still, I really wanted to grow some food and discovered that I could do it in bags made from landscape fabric! Thanks to some sewing skills, I made several bags easily. Then we filled them up with soil and planted some baby strawberry plants and radish seeds! All this when I was about 7 months pregnant! Soon, we had baby no.2 take over our garden, haha!
Our first yield of radishes!
Our budding gardener :)
Four years later, in 2021, we moved to our current home, which was a newly built one. It took us a year to find a landscaper and get some basic landscaping done. We were very excited about all the space and potential our new yard offered, but we initially started gardening in our retaining wall beds.
Our baby, now a little boy, sowing the first seeds in our garden beds in 2022. Unfortunately, we couldn’t care for our garden much that year as we were gone for several weeks that Summer.
We didn’t have much of a plan, but I knew I wanted it to be an experiential garden for the kids, similar to the botanical gardens in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. That was an ambitious dream, considering I had neither any experience nor any skills in gardening! So, of course, I relied on our excellent library and got bagfuls of books on gardening! We especially loved reading stories of people who transformed their communities and neighborhoods by growing a garden. Those stories inspired us the most!
Soil: Soil is at the heart of gardening, and we had a heart that was very, very difficult to pierce into - heavy clay soil studded with stones! Sigh. Where was all the rich, loamy fluff that I imagined soil to be?? There was no way I was going to dig into that clay! So I searched around and came across the incredible ‘No-Dig’ method - really, there's no digging, just building a bed from the ground up! Perfect!
I found an excellent video on the ‘No-Dig’ method. There are also some great books on the subject. Using these resources, and lots of enthusiasm, my kids and I got to work making our ‘lasagnas’ in the garden :)
One of the books that inspired us the most is ‘Gardening for Everyone’ by Julia Watkins. We loved the idea of building a bean teepee in the garden and decided to give it a go! After unsuccessfully trying to source some bamboo poles locally, we just ordered them from Amazon. Oh, how excited we were to get this started! And, eventually, this became the best and most magical feature of our garden - our hideout, our storytime station, and one of our most productive garden areas!
I wish I had some pictures of our yard before we transformed it into a garden, as well as some photos of the process. But, I rarely took my phone to the yard, and even if I did, we were too busy working in the dirt to take pictures!
Our first harvest of Spring greens!
