Gardening=Rocket Science? I think not!

This is an excerpt from a recent letter to a friend, but I felt it was something I wanted to save and maybe even help someone else by their reading.

I want to encourage you that gardening doesn't have to be complicated. The Lord provided us with seeds and soil so that we could cultivate the land and produce food. He meant for ALL humans to do this, not just those of us who make things more complicated that they have to be. You can make gardening as simple or as complicated as you want to. My parents always had a garden. It was a place in the yard about 50' by 100' that Daddy tilled up and planted all our veggies and melons in. It was just plain row gardening. He used triple 15 fertilizer on EVERYTHING. He used Sevin Dust for pests. That's pretty much it. He knew nothing about tomatoes loving carrots, nor about staggering your planting. We usually planted the entire garden in one day. At most it took us two days. It wasn't organic, but I do believe it was still better than what's available at the grocery store because we harvested things when they were ripe, not two weeks early, and we washed everything thoroughly. We canned it all. We didn't spend money at the grocery store on produce unless it was something that didn't grow in our climate.

The way I learned to garden as a child was very simple as far as the brain power that went into it. It was back breaking work, though. Lots and lots of hoeing and all the stuff came in at the same time, and you worked harvesting and processing/canning until you thought your back was going to break in two.

The "new" methods like square foot gardening and all the others that are out there are designed to make things easier/better. Putting down newspapers provides a weed barrier, and the worms consume it and it improves the soil, plus it helps with water conservation. On and on it goes. There are ways to make it better and easier, and you should definitely research and learn as much as you can, but know that the best thing you can do is just get in there and do it. Getting seeds in the ground, providing them with ample water, and keeping the weeds out is really all that is required. All the other stuff is just improvement.

Happy gardening!