"Garden" never means the same thing to any two people.
I don't usually list "gardening" as one of my hobbies. I don't usually tell people "I'm a gardener." Because everyone has varying ideas of what that means, and because even other "gardeners" and I will have radically different notions of what "gardening" entails.
As I was weeding my weeds (digging the grass and oversized milkweed out of the lambs'-quarters and wild sorrel) this morning, I started thinking about all the versions of "what a garden is" that I have met in my life so far.
When I was a kid, my parents had some friends. I was expected to be their kids' friends because our parents were friends. We never really were friends, though. Probably because every time my parents and I visited them, the adults never gave us a chance to play. They always put us kids to work in their garden.
According to the kids, the garden belonged to their parents but was somehow their daily job. Their parents expected perfectly straight rows, weed- and bug-free. They didn't mulch. It was perfectly groomed and raked bare earth - sort of Dust Bowl meets Zen garden.
We used to compete to see how many potato bugs each of us could collect and squash. That was probably the most fun the kids ever had in that garden. If they left so much as footprints behind them on the way out, they got yelled at. I witnessed it firsthand. (Believe it or not, that's not why mom decided to stop visiting them.)
It definitely kept the kids busy and out of the house (three bedrooms, five kids - you do the math). But it also gave all five kids a lifelong aversion to gardens.
Closely related to the bug-free, perfectly raked garden are the gardens that exist as landscaping displays of ornamentals. I'm thinking of my aunt's garden in particular.
This aunt has four boys, but the boys were never allowed to touch the garden. Her garden doesn't produce a single thing anyone can eat. Rather, it's a perfectly bug-free, weed-free expanse of fresh mulch, with vigorously pruned ornamentals installed in exact spacing, each with a name tag. It looks like a museum.
More than half of the people I have met who list "gardening" as a hobby or who attend "gardening clubs" run these in-ground plant museums. I don't understand them, which is odd because one would think I would. I too prize particular plants and cultivars. I too have mine artfully arrayed, and I too mulch them. The similarities are all general, though. I'm after natives; I plant them so they'll support one another; I mulch them with the leaves I rake into the bed each year and then leave there.
Raised beds. In-ground watering systems. Weed control covers. Fertilizers. Pesticides. All in one fertilizers and pesticides. Fertilizers and pesticides that also double as floor cleaner and underarm deodorant. (You can't tell me this can't exist.)
I grow a significant proportion of the food I eat. Yet I think I have the least in common with the "garden as food producer" types. Even my own parents. About the only thing we agree on is that we're not into chemical applications in the garden. But my parents still row crop, in neatly mulched rows, killing off every bug they can find.
I think of my gardens as vast, bustling neighborhoods. This year's A/B testing convinces me I'm right to think so.
This year I have gardens in both the front and back of the house. The front garden has been established for years. About a quarter of it is perennials, flowers and herbs; the rest is annuals and whatever volunteer plants decide to come up in any given year.
I do rake back some of the mulch so I can plant things. This year, I've planted potatoes, Brussels sprouts, peppers, onions, garlic, corn, amaranth, cilantro, dill, sweet potatoes, eggplant, and okra in the front garden. These are planted around various volunteers: cabbage, mustard, milkweed, nasturtiums, borage, dianthus, marigolds, potatoes I didn't dig up last year, biennial leeks, hyssop, yarrow, lambs'-quarters, purslane, wild sorrel.
I do weed around the food crops, just enough to thin the competition. Usually. I've actually let the entire potato bed get raided by creeping Charlie (glecheromia hederacia) this year. Those root systems work on two different levels; the Charlie functions as a green mulch, keeping water near my potatoes and more deep-rooted seedlings from making it to the sunlight. It's working great so far.
My native perennials are currently invaded by volunteer borage. I only pull the plants that threaten to shade the perennials out. Same with the milkweed.
My curblawn has a massive patch of crown vetch, yarrow, and wild chamomile in it. It's not technically garden. It just started growing there a few years ago, and I just stopped mowing so it could do that. It's grown so much that it touches the garden on the front side, essentially making it a garden extension. It helps that the nepeta has expanded to touch the vetch on one side and the baptisia is big enough to reach it on the other.
The mint has reached the volunteer squash plants and is putting up shoots between their leaves. I cut these off for tea, but otherwise I let the mint go more or less where it wants. For now.
Absolutely EVERYTHING lives in the front garden. Dozens of types of insects, crawly things, birds, small mammals, interesting plant varieties most of which I didn't drop there. It's absolutely ALIVE at every level.
My back yard just got re-mulched and turned after being let go to wildflowers for a few years. The plants in it are doing...not great. The beans will be fine. The tomatoes are clearly stressed; by what I'm still not sure. Nothing keeps the zucchini down. Everything else? Feeling meh about the back garden at best.
I blame the fact that I started with a blank slate. Sure, it's mulched, but there's no existing community to support the plants I stuck in there. No network of roots and mycorrhizae to share nutrients (working on it). No volunteer beneficial plants to draw in the diversity of insects needed to keep vegetable-eating pests in check. Fewer bugs attracts fewer birds, which means less help with pollination and seed scattering. Despite being fenced, my back garden has seen MORE damage from local mammals (who snuck under the fence in a low spot created by chicken dust bathing) than my unfenced front garden.
Nobody ever wants to listen to me lament the damage that factory farming - monocrop row-planted agriculture - does to ecosystems and, ultimately, to us. But my heart sickens every time I look at it. Yeah, it's necessary to feed the literal billions of humans we have created. But it's costing us the very thing that sustains us as a species. There is SO MUCH more life - and food - in my little suburban front yard than in any aggressively-groomed vegetable plot or cornfield. And all that life NEEDS one another to thrive. Just like we need the planet we despise and trample.
Oh, and my blue mud daubers are hatching. Neat. (Bug rants are for another post.)
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