When I was about six, my mother started me with my first garden plot. It was a smaller section inside the ambitiously large fenced in family plot behind our house, with a line of electric wire around it initially to keep the moose out. It didn’t work well enough to keep the moose out, and the garden languished on and off over the years. Except, as I remember it, my little plot. We planted a clump of chives, one single strawberry plant, and a six-pack of kohlrabi in clearly defined orderly rows. My mother showed me how to weed it and that was the end of that.
Fortunately, despite my resistance to weeding, the kohlrabi grew a couple of large turnip-style bases (deliciously sweet when eaten raw), the chives kept coming back for years pushing up their full onion blossom purple heads, and the strawberry…. that single strawberry plant took over a six by six foot plot in a matter of months. For those of you who have not grown a strawberry yourself, the mother plant sends out shoots to populate the area with, in every direction. What had started in order and form was now a mess of overlapping shoots and sizes of strawberry greenery, clustered around and throughout each other like bicycle spokes after a cataclysmic crash.
Over the years my mother and I would try pruning the strawberry shoots back, but they persisted. It continued to produce fruit over the years, in amongst and under the grass and weeds, and for years I accepted discovering the random berry with a sense of irritation and sadness for that initial orderly plot. This real life struggle to produce something beautiful and delicious was not at all what I had been looking forward to. Turns out it took way more work than I was willing to put in, work I wasn’t yet capable of.
For a beginner’s introduction to the magic of gardening, it was a worthy effort. As an attempt to cultivate a bountiful, continual harvest of strawberries, or anything else for that matter, it was not. It needed a commitment to cultivate the berries. The weeds needed to be pulled. The strawberry plants needed a dedicated row with room for them to expand and anchor in. Mulch would have likely helped keep the weeds down. These are all things I have learned over the decades since.
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