The Lazy Garden

I love a good experiment.  I think most gardeners do.  For the most part, we don't get our egos wrapped up too much in the successes and failures.  We try just to try.  The real success is learning along the way.  Such is the case with the lazy garden.

For a long time, I have wanted to try a lasagna garden.  I have perused articles and books and even scoured Atlanta for the right ingredients per an article I read in Organic Gardening.  You try going down to the local feed store and asking them if their alfalfa hay is herbicide-free.  Let me know ahead of time when you plan to make your way down there.  I could go for some entertainment.  (In all fairness, the guys are great and they are working hard to stock organic items.  I appreciate what they are trying to do.)

At any rate, eventually, I decided it just wasn't something I could do this year.  Then, my daughter came home with three or four pumpkin seedlings she had grown in school.  She was beaming.  This was big!  See, for years, while my son has approached gardening with an interest level bordering on alarming, my daughter has shown only mild interest.  When I say that what I mean is that she will stand at the edge of the garden and read a book while I tend to the business of gardening.  The pumpkin seedlings changed that.  She was beaming with pride at what she had grown.  She was telling stories of why she chose pumpkins over flowers and sunflowers.  She told me her methods for watering and ensuring it got enough light.  This was the moment.  I could sense it.  I wasn't going to waste it. 

And so, the lasagna lazy garden came to be.  The lazy garden is a modified lasagna garden done the lazy gardener way. In the lazy garden, you skip measurements and commit to using what you have so you don't have to run around finding ingredients.  Everything is very loose.  You throw in a little of this and a little of that, top it with some soil/compost, plant and pray. If you absolutely have to have something, this is not the method to use! That said, I have, in the past, had some mighty fine things grow straight out of the compost pile and this is a similar concept.  

In our lazy garden, we are growing the three sisters.  We have sunflowers, beans and summer and winter squash.  And, I am going to toss in a few tomato plants at the back just for fun.  Oh, and we have a decomposing Jarrahdale Blue pumpkin in a brown Whole Foods bag thrown in for giggles.  We'll see what comes of that.  Most importantly, we are growing a gardener with our lazy garden.  Even if this lazy garden fails and we don't get a single bloom or a single vegetable out of it, if it succeeds at growing the gardener, then I say the lazy garden will have been a huge success.

The pumpkin seedlings that started it all.

Full view of the lazy garden.

Sunflowers sown directly in the garden.

Summer squash transplanted from the main garden.

These two squash plants were removed from the main garden because they were the weaker seedlings.  They incurred quite a bit of shock during that process and dropped almost all their leaves.  They have recovered nicely.

Inside this bag is a rotting Jarrahdale Blue pumpkin.  We'll just see what happens with that.  I'll either have a pile of seeds to dust off and save for next year or we'll have pumpkin vines and (fingers crossed!) pumpkins.

There she grows again: The Great Pumpkin Experiment

For me, gardening is basically one experiment after another. Some are successful and some are, well, they don't end in an "oh, wow- I can't believe that worked" moment.

Anyway, last fall, I did an experiment with pumpkins where you put pumpkins, seeds and all, outside and have them wait until spring to send up volunteers. This is something I had read about on the Internet and decided to try thanks to the lovely owner of Indigo Bath & Body, who completely inspired me with the following, which she posted to her Facebook page:

Last year we held our green wedding at our dearest friend and maid of honor's farm, Blossom Hill. As part of the decorations, we used a plethora of pumpkins. After the wedding was finished and guests toted home all the pumpkins they could carry, farmer Melissa took what pumpkins remained and saved them for us for next season. Once spring came, sprouts of pumpkin vines started poking their heads through the grasses in the field. Now we've come full circle, and harvest time is here. This is the last crop ever to be grown by Blossom Hill, and they'll be be harvested and used in our Harvest Pumpkin soap.

(It sounds so romantic, doesn't it? Now, I should warn you that if you absolutely must have pumpkins for fall, I do not recommend this method. I would go with more traditional methods. The jury is still out on my untested, accidental-at-best method.)

Inspired, here's what went down:

• We carved our pumpkins. And, as usual, that was fun. Normally, we'd roast and eat the seeds. This year, we just dumped all the seeds into a large, white bucket. That's it. No rinsing. No separating. Just dumping. And, then they lived on the back deck for a spell.
  
• Shortly after Halloween, I retrieved the carved pumpkins from the front steps. Now, to be totally honest, I have no idea how much time went by. I know it was longer than I had intended, but before Thanksgiving. Long enough that it had rained and I wondered what that would do to the seeds since they were now floating in the bucket.
  
• I took those pumpkins and placed them on what I like to think of as the slippery slope of the backyard. I call it this because it is sloped and nothing really grows there except some daylilies. But, it gets a decent amount of sun and could be useful if I gave it some attention. Also, it is a not-so-subtle reminder of what the entire yard could look like if I don't give it the attention it needs. This alone scares me right into action.
• I filled the pumpkins with seeds from the white bucket. Let me just say that I recommend rubber gloves for this. It was not entirely unpleasant, but it was not pleasant, either. I don't think the aforementioned rain helped.
  
• Then, because there was a lot of extra space remaining in the pumpkins after I added the seeds, I decided to cover the seeds inside the pumpkins with peat and sort-of mixed it around feeling very witch-y all the while. My very scientific explanation for why I did this- it just seemed like they would be more stable on the hill if they were sufficiently filled in and weighed down. And, because I had peat in the garage, I used that. This is really ridiculous when I think about it now because peat weighs next to nothing. But, whatever, it's what I did.
• Then, I walked away, braced myself for winter and prayed for an early spring.

This morning, I went out to the yard to do a quick assessment. I decided to check out the slippery slope. And, in an area that was once a pumpkin, seed and peat pile I found this:

Could it possibly be a pumpkin seedling?
It looks similar, but it can't possibly be one, can it?
In March?
Only time will tell...