Mission: Vegetable Garden – Part 1: Planting

First of all, meet Johnston:

Johnston is the gardener of the compound to where I just moved in. When I arrived, I saw that he had planted some tomatoes in the front garden. We talked and he demonstrated an obvious passion for gardening, and was sad that the rain had spoiled his tomatoes. I asked him if he could help me set up another vegetable garden there.

It has been a while since I decided that I wanted to have a home garden, but the last places where I lived – in Brasília and in Kampala – had no space for one. I tried an herb garden once at my 1m x 1m terrace, but I couldn’t manage to make the herbs grow. Such a bitter failure for someone who grew up in a farm! When I was a child, we had a garden – my parents still do – and it was just great to spend hours there. My cousins, my sister and I would go there everyday – we wanted to make sure that the plants were growing! The favorite one was the carrot. Sometimes we would take one out of the soil to check if it was good – even when we knew it wasn’t – just to, guiltily, put it back in the soil a few seconds later. Now that I think about my childhood, it seems just crazy how the garden was fascinating to children that really resisted eating whatever came from there. I wonder why, since we weren’t exposed to all the processed food marketing we have today. I guess that one factor that contributed to this is that we were never taught how to plant anything – crazy again, I know. Well, to cut a long story short, I now eat healthier foods and I am concerned about the impacts of my food choices. And, since I just got some space, I decided to make the vegetable garden a reality.

Johnston agreed in helping me. He got the seeds – tomato, lettuce, zucchini, carrot, onion and spinach – and softened the soil where the ruined tomatoes used to be (I couldn’t help him with that, because I couldn’t stay at home on the day he decided to do it).

Then we planted:

I didn’t want to plant all the seeds of the same vegetable at the same time, because how am I supposed to eat, let’s say, 10kgs of carrots if I get them? I asked Johnston if we could plant a bit this week, then a bit more next week, in order to have an adequate on-going supply of vegetables. But Johnston told me we would loose the seeds if we didn’t plant everything that came in the can. I guess we’ll later distribute a lot of vegetables among our friends and neighbors.

He also taught me we should make lines on the soil and put a lot of seeds together for onions, carrots, lettuce and spinach – “because the insects of the soil might eat some, but some will be able to grow”. He also warned me not to put too much earth above the seeds, or they won’t grow. For the big seeds of zucchini, we made holes, far from each other, and put just one seed in each. For the tomatoes, we made a “bed” of really soft earth and put the seeds there. In three weeks, we’ll transplant the young tomato bushes to a bigger area.

It was interesting to see how people around us were mobilized by the garden. My neighbors were excited with the perspective of soon having organic vegetables. Angela, the security guard, came to help:

In the end, this is how we distributed the vegetables in the available area:

Last, I asked Johnston if we could have a compost site. He picked a spot in the back garden and I already started composting. But this is subject for another post(s)! And, if you have any suggestion on how to improve my garden, I’d be happy to hear.

Cheers!

Thaís.

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