planting blind

For the past several years, A and I have patiently made do with a back-stoop container garden. We told ourselves, "When we move into a house with a yard, then we'll start a real garden." Well, that time came and apparently, it also went. Call us chickens (hey, that sounds like a good idea for next year's garden), but we dragged our heels not knowing what (or how) to plant and settled for another year of pots. But we have BIG PLANS for those containers.

I suppose if we were really to consider the logistics of container gardening, we'd realize that we're just undertaking a costlier, less effective version of in-ground sowing. And yet those little, plastic, "terra cotta" pots exude safety - they woo us into believing that they'll protect our little herb starts from the fits of our gardening inadequacy. "Why trust the soil?" they ask, "It's just so deep - you have no idea what's down there." In reality, the containers probably reduce our success rates (and yields) and require more attention and watering. The problem - at least this year - was that damn up-front business of planning. Well, that and a skewed sense of scale.

By the time we worked up the confidence to turn our entire backyard over to raised beds, we were already kind of behind in the process of building frames, tending our compost, and stomping out the extant weeds. We wouldn't have even known about these steps if it weren't for the well-intentioned advice of a good friend of ours. This friend is a qualified gardener, grade A - the sort whose footsteps sprout fully-grown plants in her wake (she even writes well about her garden). Maybe she can't conjure vegetables from thin air, but she is sprouting heirloom bean starts on her office desk, meaning she's leaps-and-bounds ahead of us in terms of gardening skill. And that means that her "simple" advice is predicated on years of accumulated planting know-how. For A and I (who both have unhealthy needs to feel like experts), her gardening encouragement unintentionally pointed our our complete lack of experience.

Time to scale the plans back a bit. Maybe cardoons and fruit trees wouldn't make the cut this year, but we could certainly step our gardening effort up a bit. So, inspired by our friend's abundantly green thumb, we decided that if we were going to resort to containers again, we should at least endeavor to plant our own seeds. This is probably the first time since lima beans on the classroom window-sill that either of us have grown something from seed. So, on an unseasonably hot Sunday afternoon, here is what we laid out:

slow-bolt cilantro
valentine mesclun
loma lettuce & alaska early pea
blue borage
helios radish
cherry jewel nasturtium
french chervil
lemon basil
garlic chives

We consulted a few gardening books, but I'll be damned if I could definitively say that we treated any of these things properly. How do you even plant something at an eighth to a sixteenth of an inch deep? Do you cover the seed with a single grain of dirt? Well, I suppose seed depth is a moot point if we wash them all away with our over-eager watering. And if anything even sprouts, then we'll no doubt be faced with a ruthless amount of thinning; our security measure was to plant dozens of seeds in each pot.

Luckily, I happen to really like the tidy look of bare dirt in our just-planted containers. So, if nothing sprouts, at least it will always look like we've just begun.