You CAN Grow Your Own Food

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links for Etsy and refers to seeds that were given to me for free. Mentions of the seeds’ magical qualities is solely a reflection of their determination to grow despite my ineptitude and not a claim of actual Harry Potty-esque magical abilities. But that would be cool. 

You know those house plants that are indestructible? You know, the plants that “thrive on neglect”? I can’t grow any of them. I kill aloe vera plants, spider plants, cactuses – you name it. I do not have a green thumb. My thumb is brown – and not the beautiful brown of a rich soil, but more the pale brown of a dead leaf. I have dead-leaf thumb.

But every year for the past seven years, I’ve had a vegetable garden that has done just fine in spite of my terrible gardening skills. And honestly, if I can grow a tomato, so can you. And you should, because home-grown tomatoes are amazing.

When I planted my first bed seven years ago in a community garden, I had visions of my daughter and I joyfully working side by side in the soil. Like many first-time parents, I might have overestimated my seven-month-old’s abilities. She didn’t help me so much as she ate grass and breathed in the compost-fresh air.

Those cheeks. I. Just. Want. To. Squish. Them.

This little garden did reasonably well, though that was mostly thanks to my neighbour who watered the plants almost daily for me. And did a lot of the initial planting for me. And harvested the vegetables for me. I was still proud of myself.

I continued using the community garden until we moved a few years later. As soon as the weather was warm enough, James built a raised bed in the backyard and we planted. We planted a lot. Like, with total disregard for the suggested spacing found on the seed packets.

It was the first time that we gardened on our own. We messed up a bit, but you know what? Things grew. Every year, things grew.

Starting from Seed

Then, last year, I decided to try starting from seed. How hard can it be, right? In nature, things grow by themselves from tiny little seeds all the time. Surely I’m just as likely to succeed as a random seed in the wild, right?

For sure. I consulted Twitter for recommendations on where to buy seeds and the hive mind directed to Laura at Cubits. Laura offered to send me some seeds and I quite happily agreed. I would do her proud, I was sure.

When the seeds arrived, I wanted to plant them right away but it was too early in the year. I turned my energy towards the Internet and researched the best way to start seeds.

Wow. There are a lot of ways to start seeds.

Toilet paper rolls in an empty fish tank? Perfect. Wait – no, they can get moldy. Seed starting in an egg carton? We can do that! No – looks like that doesn’t give the roots enough room to grow. For every creative, low-cost suggestion I found, there seemed to be a downside.

Finally I realized that I needed to stop taking gardening advice from Pinterest and make a proper greenhouse in the basement. All I needed was soil, pots, a metal stand and fluorescent lights that I could gradually move higher as the seedling grew. Sure, it would cost money – but it would save money when we weren’t buying food at the farmers’ market in the summer, right?

Wrong. At least, that’s what my husband said. He wasn’t into the idea of spending money on my garden, especially since he’s convinced that I’ve never watered a plant in my life.

Planting the Seeds

By the time the seeds were ready to be planted, I still had no idea what to do. In a panic, I ran to Canadian Tire and picked up a little seed starter kit that included a heating pad. Finally it was time to plant. I tried to call the girls to the table so we could participate in the miracle of gardening together, but they were not interested. At all. So I waited until later in the day. And then I tried the next day. And the next. A week went by. Then another. Zero interest in poking holes in dirt.

OK, this baffled me. Planting seeds – how is that not fun? Did they suspect that I was counting on gardening being a good chunk of our summer homeschooling lessons? I started to worry that all this delaying made me miss my window of opportunity and that now we would have no seedlings for our garden and that I would have to buy pre-started seedlings from the garden store and then I would have to try and pass off a Spanish Spotted Cucumber as a Russian Speckled Squash or something and hope that no one would no that I had utterly failed.

No, I had to do this. I grabbed the kit, planted the seeds in the pods, and carefully labelled each row. Then I dragged four large Rubbermaid bins upstairs and stacked them in front of the nursery window since no one was using that room anyway. I plugged in the heating mat, put the tray on top, and then shut the door. Done.

And the seeds grew.

Before I knew it, little shoots popped out of the soil, followed by the two true leaves. All I did was spritz them with water from time to time and rotate the tray so that they’d all get an equal amount of window time.

Suddenly, I was a master gardener.

Delighted with my success, I started researching ways to help out my little sprouts. I worried when they became “leggy” because they had to reach way up towards the sun instead of just relaxing under a heat lamp, so I started blowing on them to mimic the wind and encourage hardier stem growth. I also noticed that some of the seedlings weren’t growing as fast as the others, so I plucked nearly a quarter of them out of their rows and carefully lined them up right against the window to give them more sun. Which meant that they nearly 20 little plants were no longer in their neatly labelled rows and I had no idea what was what.

Master gardener? Try disaster gardener.

Oh well, I pushed on. We’d figure it out eventually, right? And if a cucumber plant showed up in the middle of the tomato patch, well, I’d pretend it was intentional. Like the planting of the three sisters: squash, corn and beans. We could start the three brothers: radishes, basil and maple trees. Or something.

Hardening Off the Seeds

I continued to care for my seedlings and soon it was time to harden them off. Hardening off is when you bring them outside a little bit more each day, allowing the plants to gradually get used to the elements. The first day went great – I put them in the front yard in the shade. The second day was good too, I found a brighter spot for my seedlings to soak up some sun. On the third day I got bored of the whole process and just plopped them on top of our garden bed. Same with the fourth day, except I couldn’t even be bothered to bring them back in for the night. They survived.

Transplanting to the Vegetable Garden Beds

Finally it was time to plant. I ended up with far more seedlings than I could fit in my garden beds, but since I wasn’t sure if my plants would survive the transplanting process, I decided to plant all of them and then thin out the weakest ones once the plants established themselves. It made sense in my head. It did not make sense a month later when it was super hot and I didn’t want to go outside. So I just let them do their thing. My daughter was obsessed with watering plants at that time, so I can only assume that they were utterly drenched on a semi-regular basis.

Finally I dragged myself out to the backyard. I can only conclude that the Cubits seeds are magical because the plants had taken off beautifully. They had all tripled in size and my garden was a delightful tangle of horticulture. There was no way to get tomato cages over most of the tomato plants. The beans were using the evergreen trees beside the garden as a trellis.  But my plants didn’t care – they just did their thing.

Harvesting our Vegetable Garden

We had herbs and beans and even ground cherries. We had the most amazing assortment of tomatoes. I discovered that my tomato-loving middle child only eats the perfectly red ones, so I gorged on the black ones, the purple ones and the yellow ones. My oldest sat on the edge and ate the peas right off the vines. We put basil and mint on anything and everything.

I admit that it wasn’t the beautiful garden I had visions of when I started the seeds. I wasn’t sure that I even wanted to post evidence of the messy garden on my blog or Instagram. Or even Snapchat. But despite the less-than-lovely look of it all, we feasted last summer.

If you’ve been thinking of starting a garden, I encourage you to give it a shot. You just have to provide soil, sun and water and that’s really it – Mother Nature pretty much figures out the rest. If I can do it, you can do it. And personally, I can’t wait to get started this year.

Linked up at: Simply Natural Saturdays, Small Victories Sunday