The Garden Plot Thickens

My first foray into veggie gardening 👩‍🌾

About a month ago, I briefly mentioned my new garden plot. Since planting veggies for its inaugural season, I’ve been meaning to start a garden journal to document what I planted and the progress along the way. Given this is entirely new to me, I figured I’ll learn along the way so it would behoove me to document it, assuming there will be a next time.

But lo and behold, four weeks have passed and I haven’t gotten around to it. Luckily, I had the foresight to take progress pictures of my garden each time I visit it. While showing them to my mom the other day, I thought, why don’t I just write about my garden progress here on The Conscious Consumer?

So, that’s what I have for you today. A short and sweet update on how this came to be and how it's going so far.

For context, I discovered sometime last year that Nike has a community garden with roughly 50 or so plots on its campus. I consider it one of the best kept secrets, because it is a completely free, first-come first-serve benefit that isn’t advertised at all.

It might as well be a secret gathering place, for its location is neatly hidden behind a vacant building on the perimeter of campus, the walls blocking it from the east and a fence blocking the other sides. You wouldn't know where it was unless someone took you there, which is precisely what happened to me last year.

The minute I saw it, I navigated to the garden's Slack channel and requested to be added to the waitlist.

When I got the email that I'd gotten access to a plot for this year's gardening season, I was stoked and could feel the “yes” at the tip of my tongue. But some anxiety instantly crept in too—can I really do that? Would I be overcommitting myself by planting a garden that’s 16 miles away from my home when I don’t want to spend anymore time than I have to at work?

Then it occurred to me, why not ask around and find a friend to share the plot with me? It is a community garden after all. I’m constantly putting effort into deepening my community at work and trying to make friendships that permeate the workplace walls, so it seemed like the perfect chance to try doing so. I could share the mental load of the garden, trade watering duties, and get to know someone more along the way. It was perfect!

So I sent an email to roughly 15 or so women I knew, bcc'ing them all. It felt more vulnerable than I thought it would, since I didn’t know most of these people very well, let alone talked about gardening with them at all.

It turned out only one of the women got back to me within the allotted timeframe, but one is all I needed—I can’t tell you how delighted I was to hear from her. She had tried her hand at growing veggies in her own backyard a couple years ago and had some varying success, so it was a helpful starting point to be able to bounce thoughts off her.

We decided to split the garden plot down the middle lengthwise and agreed to share each other’s bounties because neither of us are precious about it. We strategized on the veggie starters we bought so that we could get the most diversity possible out of our 32-square-foot box.

I planted five different things: Brandywine heirloom tomato, Chocolate Sprinkles cherry tomato, golden bell pepper, pickling cucumber, and leaf lettuce mix. My friend planted corn, celery, mini bell peppers, slicing cucumbers, and a bush bean.

Thanks to the free soil provided by Nike and leftover compost my friend had, all I had to buy was my starts—a grand total of $25. Since then I've been thinking of this garden as “my $25 experiment,” where the worst that could happen is I learn some lessons while making a friend for the grand sum of $25. The best-case scenario of course being a plentiful garden where everything goes perfectly.

In order to convince myself to give this a try, I had to lower the bar of success for myself. Much like I wrote about a few weeks back, I knew I couldn’t go into this expecting it to be easy. I’d try it out and see how it goes.

A month has passed since then and I'm quite pleased at our garden’s progress. After spending an hour lunch break in the midday sun to plant our starts alongside one another, we've shared watering duties, sending each other updates and photos along the way.

Thanks to the bout of sunshine and 60-75 degree temps we had for nearly two weeks shortly after planting, most of our veggies seem to have taken well, save a little celery plant or two. I was worried about my lettuce, its appearance looking wilted and drab for the first several days, but now it’s thriving and nearly ready for harvesting.

Just the other day I noticed the first budding on my cherry tomato plant. I felt a little jolt of childlike joy at seeing it.

Besides seeing the garden’s progress, the best part has been having this little wonderland to escape to for a midday break. Some days via car, some days via bike, most days in the sunshine.

Each time I’ve tucked behind the gate I feel like I’m the little girl in The Secret Garden, happening upon a precious place. I look forward to the wonders that await. 🌱

(1) A blank canvas; (2) Initial planting on April 23; (3) 1-week progress; (4) 3-week progress

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