Reading this week:

• American Imperialist by Arwen P. Mohun
• Hunting Trips in Northern Rhodesia by D.D. Lyell, F.Z.S. (pretty racist)

As it has been over a year since my previous update on our garden, it is time to give you all the latest, and the last. You see our time in undisclosed country is drawing to a close and so therefore too is our time with this particular garden. And um there isn’t actually a whole lot to update. We did not grow as much this year as in previous years. The seeds we had did not really take this time, so there was no big harvest of various foodstuffs. For a while there some pumpkin vines were sprouting of their own accord, and really taking over the garden area. The trellis we had gotten set up the year before was still there, even though it never really served as a rain shield, but with the pumpkin vines it could instead serve as a very nice sunshade with vines growing all up an around. But although the vines covered the sky and ground and there were many flowers, never did any begin to grow a pumpkin. Oh well.

Instead my real big successes were trees. This was all touch and go for a while. I see in my last post that I was excited for my avocado tree to grow taller than I was, and I can happily report it is significantly taller than I am, all in only about two years. Still no avocados of course, but I am sure the next occupants of the house will find them delicious. In the dry season the leaves were getting coated with some sort of grime, or perhaps a fungus, though it would still push out new leaves occasionally. In the rainy season it seems to have recovered its mojo and shot right on up. It is my single most successful tree I’ve ever grown.

In that last post you’ll also recall my small citrus tree in the ground. Unfortunately it has remained small and rather unhealthy. I don’t know what is wrong or what to do right, though it is still hanging on. Instead above is a picture of a totally different citrus tree, this one I think orange though I mixed up all my seedlings and can’t remember. I think keeping it in a pot on that concrete platform helped, as it made it harder for pests to get to it from the grass. I think. It is really now much too large for that pot but I was reluctant to change it as I knew I would give it away and didn’t want to make it too unwieldly. In our wrap-up here it has indeed found a new home where it will live for some time, and they have already created a much larger box in which it can reside. A proud legacy! Though also in the back of the house there are several small citrus trees I planted which were quite sickly for a while but are now growing quite strong. Maybe someday there will be tons more citrus.

A fun part of the garden (when I am not accidentally walking through spider webs) is all the bug (and frog) life. In fact the frog above is the first I have seen, and I spotted it hiding out in a new leaf. I suppose that might actually be a baby toad, and those we have seen plenty of, but I am no herpetologist. The various other critters have also been cool, and it has been interesting to spot them as I walk around. Some I see often, like the spiders, but I only ever saw one of the anime-looking mantis, and the pictured jumping spider is the only one I’ve seen in the midst of catching prey. Life is truly wonderful. Besides the tiny critters and the toads, also this year a rather large rat-looking thing moved into some of the bushes in the corner. I was happy to have it there, as I figured that its presence meant our yard must not have many snakes. Not that I dislike snakes in general, but I wouldn’t want to disturb one in surprise as that would be unpleasant for both of us. Oh and lizards! There are lots of lizards!

At any rate that has been our gardening experience here in undisclosed country. It has been a lot of fun and it is so nice to have some greenery outside the window. I hope the trees will continue to grow big and strong and bear fruit, and more importantly that the friends we are leaving behind will take pictures of the trees with that fruit and send it to me. I will be so proud.

• The Amistad Revolt by Iyunolu Folayan Osagie
• Borne by Jeff VanderMeer

It has been the better part of a year since my last gardening update and once again the rainy season is upon us, so it is time to let you all know where things stand. The dry season was actually pretty good for the garden. The disadvantage of the dry season is that you have to water the garden yourself, so that’s a morning chore I had to accomplish the whole time. The advantage of the dry season though is that many plants don’t actually like having gigantic deluges dropped on them every day, so a lot of stuff grew really well. The picture above is probably the garden at its peak. As covered in the previous post there are some additional garden boxes but they were trying to grow brussels sprouts which never gave us any sprouts for reasons I am too lazy to even google. But the above boxes gave us some pretty alright harvests. The chives and green onions grew well, though a bit slowly, and we have still a good garden bed of mint my super amazing wife likes to make into tea. And then our single most successful crop was basil, which grew really well in this climate. We made a lot of pesto. Some of our other harvests are below, which included calendula, purple green beans, and about a half dozen total cherry tomatoes. The tomatoes just didn’t grow well.

The two plants I have tended to the most though are the trees I am growing, below. On the left is an avocado tree that I seeded and has shot up. It’s getting to be almost as tall as I am and I am excited for it to be taller than I am. There is also my little lime tree. Both of these trees I grew from seeds from fruits that we had bought so that is neat. I am a bit confused as to why the lime tree is still looking more like a short lime bush, but again I am too lazy to google like, lime tree lifecycle. I just like growing fruit trees even if I’ve never managed to keep one alive long enough to actually see them bear any fruit. But someday somebody will get fruit from these trees and that is neat.

We have not been the only ones enjoying the garden. Thankfully we haven’t had too many pests of the type that will actually eat plants, but we’ve had some visitors. The bird below acted a bit suspicious but I don’t think ate anything. And if the rather large spider ate anything I don’t mind because we aren’t eating the same things. I had to remember to not walk through that web though because for sure that spider would have eaten me.

As stated above it’s now rainy season and a lot of the plants don’t really like all the rain. Although the beans and the mint do well the basil we were using so much of absolutely just wilted under the rain. That’s fact one. The other fact you have to know is that we have a gardener and our neighbors have a different gardener. I think our gardener gets jealous of the other gardener. We really hired our gardener just to mow the lawn, and him working on the garden is just a bonus thing on top of the lawn. The neighbors though, they have a much smaller lawn and also give their gardener more leeway. And the neighbors’ gardener shows up seems like 2-3 times a week, whereas we only have ours come once. All this to say that the neighbors’ garden, although not as big, is much more lush and has a wider variety of plants. I think this makes our gardener jealous. Often when the neighbors garden gets some feature I’ll discover our gardener has done the same to ours.

Which brings us to the most dramatic events of the past week. One solution to “the plants don’t like all the rain” is to build a shelter over the garden. Our neighbors’ gardener had built a little hut over their garden and put a tarp over it to shelter it from the rain. So our gardener started talking about doing the same. We were enthusiastic about this, for the sake of the basil. Except a couple things. One is that it took us too long to get our act together and the basil was pretty much done for anyway. The other is that by the time we got our act together our neighbors’ garden shelter had collapsed because the rain was too much for it. This was not going to show our gardener up. He was undaunted. He was not only undaunted, he was like, taking this as an opportunity to shine. The neighbors’ structure fell down because it was too weak, our gardener explained to me. We would do better. Still I was surprised to come home one day to find the man constructing the absolutely giant canopy pictured above. It was a very robust structure. The picture above was taken last Tuesday, when it was brand new. But alas, the picture below was taken last night. The poor thing didn’t even last a week. It’s not our gardeners’ fault, his structure held up beautifully. But the tarp failed. The tarp I chose. So I have let my gardener down and I don’t know how I will face the man on Tuesday, when he comes again. But I guess we’ll see. In the meantime, basil RIP.

Reading this week:

• The Portugal Story by John Dos Passos

One of the things I was excited about for moving to undisclosed country was the ability to garden. As we’ve discussed, gardening on a balcony is not the easiest thing in the world. In undisclosed country we got a house, and like many houses this one came with a yard. And a yard means we can garden in earnest!

Mostly anyway. It is not exactly a field outside my old mud hut, the most important distinction being that there is a landlord with this one and we can’t really do major landscaping work without permission and that seems like a hassle to ask. Plus I have to be worried about digging up like a sewer or electrical line or something. So we can only do so much. But luckily for us we inherited a garden! That is very exciting. The previous tenants had constructed some garden boxes and had some plants going already when we arrived. As you can see from the top picture the garden was suffering a bit from neglect when we arrived, which is not the fault of the previous tenants, they had left undisclosed country so it was hard for them to do some weeding.

Another big difference between here in undisclosed country and back in Zambia is that here we have a gardener. Besides the garden the house comes with a lawn that has to be mowed. There was not an easy way to do this. I guess not a lot of people have lawns so I couldn’t find like a lawnmower to mow the lawn. So because we had no real way to do it ourselves we hired a gardener. He is almost too good. What we hired him to do was just mow the lawn (which he does an excellent job at) but since he is a gardener he also works on the garden. Above is what the garden looked like after he took a first pass at it, getting rid of a lot of the overgrowth and weeding out the garden beds. I say he is almost too good because I thought I would do some gardening as a hobby around here but I seem to have accidentally subcontracted that out. I only really wanted the guy to mow the lawn but he is really enthusiastic so who am I to stop him?

The crops the previous tenants had going were maize, kale, peppers, and parsley. Some of these were fairing better than others. The maize has grown tall but I think besides being too close together the climate just isn’t as suited to it. Maize needs some time to dry out and undisclosed country is simply not affording it that luxury. So a lot of the stalks have fallen over in the damp soil and weren’t really growing any fruit anyways. Oh well. The kale is growing well though, we have harvested some of that and used it in various dishes. It is also very popular with the snails, unfortunately. We also got a small harvest of peppers which was very neat:

As for the parsley, unfortunately tragedy struck. You can see better in the second picture, but the parsley was growing in an elevated garden bed. When we arrived it was already a bit rickety, being held up by a cinder block shoved underneath it, and I had meant to take it down and move it over. We had already transplanted some parsley (to mixed success) with that in mind. But then a heavy rain came in and we were down a garden bed:

The poor parsley! The other thing about having a gardener is that I feel like the garden can’t be too bad when he shows up. I hear people tidy up before their housekeeper arrives as well. So I had to do something with the garden bed before he arrived the next day. The rain didn’t let up, I didn’t have a hammer yet (it’s still coming), but I had to go out there anyways and do something about the poor fallen over garden bed so I wouldn’t be too embarrassed. Using some of the wood scraps I bodged this together:

It could be worse but it is pretty terrible I admit. It is held up by those boards in the front and the rock on the side. The dirt is just shoveled in there. When our gardener came the next day I explained it was the rain that took the raised garden bed out, lest he think I was just knocking over his hard work. He seemed suspicious but accepted my explanation. Then the next time I came out, there were two garden beds:

He not only fixed up and leveled out the garden bed I had put together, he had also transplanted some tomato plants into it and taken the rest of the scrap wood and created a whole second garden bed! He is too good man, showing me up, I am embarrassed. Seriously he is fantastic. But that is where we are at for the beginning of our gardening. We have hired a professional, gained a garden bed, harvested some of the previous tenants’ crops, and now just need to figure out how to get some seeds. That has not been as easy as I thought it would. But we’ll figure out a way. Can’t wait to see how it looks in a few months!

This is the saga of my super amazing wife and I trying to garden on our balcony. As you’ll recall from my Peace Corps days, I used to have a rather large garden around my house where I would spend my days growing crops and the like. I even harvested some pretty good stuff towards the end there and made a meal out of it, which is very neat. In New Haven all I really managed to grow was a small mango tree for the porch which I eventually and tragically killed by leaving it outside during some freezing rain. My super amazing wife grew up on a farm and likes to be surrounded by plants and animals so when we moved to our apartment together in Alexandria we got one with a balcony instead of a sun room specifically so we could spend time out there and also try to grow some plants. I first tried to convince her we could raise cows and/or sheep out there, and despite her deep love of sheep we didn’t do either which is sad but there you go.

Anyways the garden. We tried growing things both summers we were there (past tense because as I am writing this we have moved out of Alexandria and to an undisclosed country far far away) though summer 1 didn’t go so well. It started off pretty alright but then we disappeared for a week and everything died and we didn’t really manage to get it going again. But summer 2 went a lot better! Our setup was just six or so window garden troughs set up on a metal rack so we could keep it neat and everything outside.

My super amazing wife and I had different philosophies when it came to what we decided to grow in our individual garden beds. I pay no heed to practicality and only try to grow what interests me, which is mostly what I fondly remember growing in Zambia, such as carrots and orange sweet potatoes and beans. I also like to try to grow fruit trees, in memory of my little mango tree that again I tragically killed because I was a neglectful plant parent. None of these things however grow particularly well in tiny little containers on a balcony. My super amazing wife on the other hand is really thoughtful about what would grow well in such conditions and what she would actually use in the kitchen and also what would be pretty, so she instead favors herbs and wildflowers. She thought I was very silly when I tried to grow carrots in a balcony container.

And for a while I thought she was very silly for doubting me because the carrots seemed to grow gangbusters and were looking really good from the top but then when I finally harvested they were tiny and she was right of course (you can see the results in the first pic in this post). But what did a lot better were the soybeans I planted for edamame. Those plants grew pretty big and I got about as big a harvest as you could possibly expect from one tiny little balcony pot, and we subsequently enjoyed some home-grown edamame which was fun:

Some of our balcony garden lives on. In addition to the balcony garden, my super amazing wife had a whole bunch of houseplants that she wanted to stay alive while we were living in this undisclosed country. I had to bring my DeLorean down to my parents’ house anyways, so my mom very kindly offered to babysit all the plants for a few years. I was initially going to take the AutoTrain down to Florida and was very much looking forward to that, but turns out you can’t take a DeLorean on the AutoTrain. They don’t accept gullwing doors because the people who park the car on the train wouldn’t be able to get out of the car (so they say). So I wound up driving all the plants down to Florida myself, which was really a fine experience overall (and I finally got to test out my cupholder on a long car drive), but still, it wasn’t relaxing on a train for 16 hours overnight.

My mom has reported that so far the plants we brought her are absolutely thriving. I shouldn’t be too surprised, the difference between me and my mom is that my mom actually looks up what is good for the plants and then behaves accordingly. My little lemon tree was suffering I think because I was overwatering it. I had left for a week and my super amazing wife didn’t water it much and it suddenly grew two new branches, and now in Florida for like a month it is already twice as big despite me trying to grow it for the better part of two years. But having a balcony garden was a hoot and now in undisclosed country we have significantly more space (though still not Zambia space) and I am excited to see what we manage to grow out there!