Grow Your Own
(Page 6 of 13)
May/June 1970
By Jeanie Darlington
I also planted an herb garden containing parsley, tarragon, mint, borage, oregano, sweet marjoram, sage, chevril, silver and lemon thyme, lavender, rosemary, chives, comfrey and catnip. There were flowers here and there alongside the steps in a little triangular plot. Here I had sowed a few packets of seed - Old Fashioned Garden, California Wild Flowers, Morning Glory and Poppies. The result was really a knockout - a mass of every color but mainly pinks and reds and blues and purples. It was like having a full blown real life Matisse right in your own back yard for three solid months. Often Sandy would walk silently around the yard, staring at everything. It was a form of meditation.
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We loved watching the lady bugs, who especially liked to live in the upper leaves of the sunflowers. Often they would fly down and land on our shoulders and walk along for a bit and then go back to their roost. A friendly hello.
The mantids seemed to like the parsley and dusty miller best for their homes, although one even migrated to the long row of potted plants on our front porch in late August, where he contemplated a tiny piece of chicken we offered him for four hours before deciding not to eat it. We named him Manty and he stayed on the porch until early December, living in a pot of basil. He shed his skin three times and ate baby leafhoppers and a worm Sandy once brought him. On his last skin moult, he acquired a pair of long brown wings, and soon after he wandered away. To mate, then die? The Bay Area's weather is not mild enough for mantids to survive the winter.
I hope this book will help people get started growing their own vegetables and flowers organically. Having a garden is such a wonderful experience.
Some people still wonder why go to all the trouble to do it organically. I think it's much simpler to garden organically, at least on a small backyard scale. People are beginning to be aware of ecology. Organic gardening is something each of us can do to help. I'm quite sure it's cheaper to garden organically than with synthetic chemicals. You don't have to buy five different types of poison sprays and several different fertilizer mixes. Compost can be made for free or for a very little bit of money. For less than $20.00, I bought 100 lbs. each of blood meal (N), phosphate (P), and granite dust (K). That will last me several years.
It's without a doubt more fun to garden organically. It's nice to have living things like Manty and the ladybugs around. They become friends. And it's a good influence on your children. It's a pleasure to dig into rich soil, full of fat happy earthworms. I love watching the birds splash around in our improvised bird bath and knowing that any bread I toss out to them will be gone in several hours.
Organically grown food really does taste better. Unfortunately I have seen some pretty sad looking organic produce at some health food stores. I don't know if this is due to the problems of large scale farming, or bad shipping and storage methods or what. My vegetables almost always look beautiful enough to be photographed for seed catalogues and I'm no veteran farmer.
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