Think Globally Dig Locally

When my wife and I were out sailing around Central America, I told her that when we settled back on land there was no way I was going to get back into gardening. For routine garden work I said, we would pay a gardener, I was no longer going to be a slave to a lawnmower. Which worked out well enough for a few years especially as we don't have any lawns, just wood chips and pea rock. Then I decided I needed to put my back where my mind was, so I went out to Home Depot and started spending money:Upon the advice of Lisa and Josh we spent a little less than $250 and came home with planks and plywood to make four vegetable beds, four feet by four feet (1.5 square meters each), soil to fill them and a few pots for some fruit trees. Lisa has been developing her own southernmost garden over the past few years:She showed me how she created her own raised beds using simple pine planks with plywood floors, properly drilled to drain water. I followed her instructions and found a shadier spot for some vegetables that don't need to be in the direct path of the blazing southern sun:With their help the selection process to get all the necessary stuff was easy and painless, and I have started to put together my new beds. The pots were a bit easier as all it took was basically lining the bottom with some rocks for drainage and tossing some potting soil in on top:Lisa gave us a couple of pineapple cuttings, and as unpromising as they looked I just stuck the spiky things into the dirt and off they hopefully go, they seem quite vigorous so far in their pots. We also got a mango, a key lime, an avocado and an orange tree and I spent a pleasant afternoon potting them as well.I am always astonished by the way things grow. It seems to me wildly improbable that things will sprout, never mind flourish, when they are stuck in the ground but sure enough the drive to live pushes them up. This neck of the woods is not very promising as far as gardening goes, thanks to the absence of soil and proximity to salt water, but it is frost free and I think it's time I took advantage of all that sunlight.Lisa calls her beds a Victory Garden which puzzled her mother who had to point out there isn't a war on, but her daughter ever the activist begged to differ. She's fighting to create her own locally grown organic food:This gardening thing is an experiment for me, I find it surprising that I have taken to it after decades of not wanting to deal with growing things. I justify in my mind as a way of seeing how well we can do growing our own food, organic, local and overseen by ourselves. I hope we can fend off the damned iguanas and insect pests and have something to eat in a few months. I expect some failures but I hope that given time and experience I will remember the lessons my father taught me years ago.

It was his only hobby and I grew up in a vast market garden of growing things, we composted, mulched, dug and pruned with a will. This photograph from around 1960 shows my early days of motoring in a part of our kitchen garden in England, when I must have been two or three years old. There are quite a few edibles growing in the background:I am getting back into it on a more modest scale, four beds, a few pots and I hope the patience to expand as soon as i think I understand what I'm doing:

Having friends who can show the way is a big help and Lisa is quite the adventurous gardener, taking advantage of our frost-free climate to grow wildly tropical fruits in her much larger space. Sunday night we went by the have dinner and after dinner we sat out in the balmy eighty degree night and watched the full moon hover between the clouds:As we sat down below in the midst of Lisa and Josh's arboretum:Josh has half a dozen degrees of one sort or another to his name and he is driving the bio-diesel program at Key West High School:He also introduced me to something called Gentleman Jack, a brand of whiskey that was in large part responsible for my inability to produce a coherent essay yesterday. We sat out under the stars marveling at our good fortune, enjoying the absence of seasons, more or less:Lisa is a teacher at a nearby middle school and together the two of them taught for a couple of years in Kuwait. they were momentous years as there was an outbreak of some unpleasantness next door in Iraq, and they have their own stories of ducking and covering:It was a just reward for screwing and drilling and cursing and grovelling looking for errant seed packets the afternoon before.

They also introduced my wife and I to the value of a tropical outdoor fire to poke and stare into as the whiskey level dropped and the conversation slowed, and soon enough it was time for bed. My wife, the designated driver carried me home.