Gardening descrescendo

(It's the opposite of a crescendo. I had to look it up.)

It seems like the history of me writing about gardening on the small internet is basically the story of my efforts getting ever, well, smaller. But not in the warm and fuzzy "smol" sense, although maybe I ought to try to mentally reframe it that way.

Things started out all the way back in ye olde 2019 (now very genuinely able to be thought of as "the before times"), when, in dear old Finland, we rented for two years a whopping 100 square metre plot of high clay content soil alongside a river which provided water for, well, watering. This plot cost us an absolute pittance, I forget the actual price, but it was surely less than we spent all up on tools and seeds and fertilisers and what not, to the extent that the land itself was essentially free of charge. Our plot was barely five minutes from our home by bike, in the opposite direction of the city, which our home was already on the edges of anyway, so the garden was a lovely peaceful place where you didn't even see or hear cars, and wild pheasants frolicked (and vandalised gardens, but we forgave them). Not everything we tried growing enjoyed the clay soil, but on both years we received potatoes and all kinds of squash-family vegetables in bountiful quantities.

2019-06-11 Phlog post "My hundred square metres"

2019-08-25 Phlog post "Gardening update"

Then we moved to Sweden, to an approximately same-sized city where nevertheless the waiting lists for any kind of community garden were literal years long, and so instead we asked the tenant's association which owned our building for permission to install two little raised beds in the small communal lawn area and tried our hand at square foot gardening. Yields were obviously reduced, but the whole thing still felt like a success and in particular I still remember fondly the prodigious output of New Zealand spinach we received. I would stop by the beds on my way out the door to work each morning and pluck a handful of leaves to add to the salad in my lunchbox. Unfortunately only a few months into this endeavour our permission to have the beds was revoked. Not because of anything we had done, but because immediately after they turned up multiple other tenants of the building asked for permission to make use of some of the communal space for projects of their own. The association quickly concluded it wouldn't be possible to say yes to everybody without the area being overrun, and so the fairest thing was to say no to everybody, including us, retrospectively. That was pretty annoying. They at least gave us until the end of the year to tear the things down, but still. But as it turned out we would have had to do it by around the same time anyway as we ended up moving.

2020-05-09 Phlog post "Almost square foot gardening"

2020-07-15 Gemlog post "Gardening update"

2020-10-04 Gemlog post "2020 gardening wrap-up"

Now as of 2021 we are finally settled in the one place for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, we're now living in a building whose lot does not include so much as a single blade of grass, no un-paved outdoor area whatsoever. This is not as bad as it sounds, we're not living in some kind of dystopian Kowloon walled city scenario, in fact we are once again kind of on the edge of the city and not very far by bike at all from large parks, forests, and rivers. I feel like we're in a definite sweet spot trading off the convenience of city life with easy accessibility of large green spaces, it's just that we don't have a single square foot of soil to call our own. The waiting times for community garden plots are once again years long, and even worse I have heard rumours that here such plots come burdened with spirit-crushing petty bureaucratic restrictions on what you can and can't grow and how much you can grow of any one thing. So we're not likely to *get* any soil to call our own, either. What we *do* have, however, is a 5 or 6 meter long wall of floor-to-ceiling South-facing windows, three stories up, which receive copious quantities of glorious sunlight for much of the year. As such we experimented for the very first time with indoor-only gardening.

I can't really say our early efforts in this direction have been much of a success, and our yield this year was limited basically entirely to a half dozen or so red capsicums (aka bell peppers or paprikas). Did you know that *all* capsicums initially grow as green ones and only turn yellow or red much later? I didn't, but have now seen it happen with my own eyes. They were small, but delicious. We tried tomatoes again, and while the plants grew quickly and strongly from seedlings into full blown plants, and flowered, they bore no fruit. We have kept a small potted lemon tree, which we rescued from next to a dumpster, alive indoors for two years now, but it is in some kind of zombie state. It is regularly besieged by horrible little bugs which cover it in some sticky excretion. We remove all these critters and painstakingly wipe the leaves clean several times a year, and it flowers each year, and grows healthy looking new leaves at approximately the same rate that it drops sad dead-looking ones when we let the bug situation grow out of control. The plant itself seems in no danger of dying, but it also isn't getting any larger or healthier looking over time, and it has never once appeared to make any effort to produce fruit. I kind of suspect it will remain in this stasis state indefinitely while it is confined to the indoors and really needs to be outside. I'll have to try to rehome it.

I think we will need to change tack next year, accept the limitations of our situation and be content with growing herbs and microgreens and that kind of thing, maybe branch out into sprouting. I'm also willing to focus more on purely decorative plants. I got into gardening very explicitly with the goal of learning more about and moving closer toward genuine food self-sufficiency, and I considered growing things which you couldn't eat to be a waste of time and effort. Over time I have softened my stance on this a lot. There is joy and beauty in nursing *any* living thing, and this is reward enough in and of itself even in the absence of utility. We grew some tulips in a pot this year and that helped a lot in shifting my attitude. Which is probably for the best, because while some non-trivial degree of food self-sufficiency might have been an attainable goal back in Finland, I think it is pretty clearly off the table for us for the time being.