Gardening descrescendo

(It's the opposite of a crescendo. I had to look it up.)

It seems like the history of me writing about gardening on the

small internet is basically the story of my efforts getting ever,

well, smaller. But not in the warm and fuzzy "smol" sense, although

maybe I ought to try to mentally reframe it that way.

Things started out all the way back in ye olde 2019 (now very

genuinely able to be thought of as "the before times"), when,

in dear old Finland, we rented for two years a whopping 100 square

metre plot of high clay content soil alongside a river which provided

water for, well, watering. This plot cost us an absolute pittance,

I forget the actual price, but it was surely less than we spent all

up on tools and seeds and fertilisers and what not, to the extent

that the land itself was essentially free of charge. Our plot was

barely five minutes from our home by bike, in the opposite direction

of the city, which our home was already on the edges of anyway,

so the garden was a lovely peaceful place where you didn't even see

or hear cars, and wild pheasants frolicked (and vandalised gardens,

but we forgave them). Not everything we tried growing enjoyed the

clay soil, but on both years we received potatoes and all kinds of

squash-family vegetables in bountiful quantities. [1, 2]

Then we moved to Sweden, to an approximately same-sized city where

nevertheless the waiting lists for any kind of community garden were

literal years long, and so instead we asked the tenant's association

which owned our building for permission to install two little

raised beds in the small communal lawn area and tried our hand at

square foot gardening. Yields were obviously reduced, but the whole

thing still felt like a success and in particular I still remember

fondly the prodigious output of New Zealand spinach we received.

I would stop by the beds on my way out the door to work each morning

and pluck a handful of leaves to add to the salad in my lunchbox.

Unfortunately only a few months into this endeavour our permission

to have the beds was revoked. Not because of anything we had done,

but because immediately after they turned up multiple other tenants

of the building asked for permission to make use of some of the

communal space for projects of their own. The association quickly

concluded it wouldn't be possible to say yes to everybody without

the area being overrun, and so the fairest thing was to say no to

everybody, including us, retrospectively. That was pretty annoying.

They at least gave us until the end of the year to tear the things

down, but still. But as it turned out we would have had to do it

by around the same time anyway as we ended up moving. [3, 4, 5]

Now as of 2021 we are finally settled in the one place for the

foreseeable future. Unfortunately, we're now living in a building

whose lot does not include so much as a single blade of grass,

no un-paved outdoor area whatsoever. This is not as bad as it

sounds, we're not living in some kind of dystopian Kowloon walled

city scenario, in fact we are once again kind of on the edge of

the city and not very far by bike at all from large parks, forests,

and rivers. I feel like we're in a definite sweet spot trading off

the convenience of city life with easy accessibility of large green

spaces, it's just that we don't have a single square foot of soil

to call our own. The waiting times for community garden plots

are once again years long, and even worse I have heard rumours

that here such plots come burdened with spirit-crushing petty

bureaucratic restrictions on what you can and can't grow and how

much you can grow of any one thing. So we're not likely to get

any soil to call our own, either. What we do have, however, is

a 5 or 6 meter long wall of floor-to-ceiling South-facing windows,

three stories up, which receive copious quantities of glorious

sunlight for much of the year. As such we experimented for the

very first time with indoor-only gardening.

I can't really say our early efforts in this direction have been much

of a success, and our yield this year was limited basically entirely

to a half dozen or so red capsicums (aka bell peppers or paprikas).

Did you know that all capsicums initially grow as green ones

and only turn yellow or red much later? I didn't, but have now

seen it happen with my own eyes. They were small, but delicious.

We tried tomatoes again, and while the plants grew quickly and

strongly from seedlings into full blown plants, and flowered, they

bore no fruit. We have kept a small potted lemon tree, which we

rescued from next to a dumpster, alive indoors for two years now,

but it is in some kind of zombie state. It is regularly besieged

by horrible little bugs which cover it in some sticky excretion.

We remove all these critters and painstakingly wipe the leaves

clean several times a year, and it flowers each year, and grows

healthy looking new leaves at approximately the same rate that

it drops sad dead-looking ones when we let the bug situation grow

out of control. The plant itself seems in no danger of dying, but

it also isn't getting any larger or healthier looking over time,

and it has never once appeared to make any effort to produce fruit.

I kind of suspect it will remain in this stasis state indefinitely

while it is confined to the indoors and really needs to be outside.

I'll have to try to rehome it.

I think we will need to change tack next year, accept the limitations

of our situation and be content with growing herbs and microgreens

and that kind of thing, maybe branch out into sprouting. I'm also

willing to focus more on purely decorative plants. I got into

gardening very explicitly with the goal of learning more about

and moving closer toward genuine food self-sufficiency, and I

considered growing things which you couldn't eat to be a waste of

time and effort. Over time I have softened my stance on this a lot.

There is joy and beauty in nursing any living thing, and this

is reward enough in and of itself even in the absence of utility.

We grew some tulips in a pot this year and that helped a lot in

shifting my attitude. Which is probably for the best, because while

some non-trivial degree of food self-sufficiency might have been

an attainable goal back in Finland, I think it is pretty clearly

off the table for us for the time being.

[1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/my-hundred-square-metres.txt

[2] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/gardening-update.txt

[3] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/almost-square-foot-gardening.txt

[4] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/gardening-update-2.txt

[5] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/2020-gardening-wrap-up.txt