My girlfriend Leanna sent me a link to a YouTube video about a gardening technique called Polyculture. It’s a broad term, but this particular rendition of the theory never occurred to me, and it’s brilliant. In a small area, thickly sow seeds that leverage different soil depths and come into fruit at a different speed. After just a few weeks, you begin to harvest. And you continue to do so.
I took the idea and compacted it into what I call the 7-11, a nod to the old convenience stores you used to see everywhere. My convenience garden is a rolling 18 X 42-inch plant cart just outside the backdoor. When in a hurry or the weather keeps me from the kitchen garden, I can grab some fresh goodies at the 7-11.
Through the fairer months, the container served as my herb convenience garden. The dirt was now spent of nutrition, so I added compost, a bit of commercial organic potting soil, and three eggs. The latter, I cracked into the bottom of the container, whites, yolk, shells, and all, to give the tired soil new life.
The garden began with five or six lettuce plugs started weeks earlier, plus chive bulbs and a modest parsley plant. In addition, I thickly strowed lettuce, radish, and carrot seed.
In two weeks, the chives and lettuces were looking almost ready for the picking, and the seeds were just beginning to sprout.
In mid-November, I harvested the first full lettuce “head.” I hesitate to use that word because it conjures the image of the tight, nutritionless balls of lettuce you see at your grocery store. Below at right, you see the loose round-ish arrangement of lettuce leaves, and that is what I mean.
Next up – RADISHES. So yummy. And as you take a big one, the smaller ones move into the space and have room to mature. It’s amazing how fast they produce.
The showing didn’t change much from here on out because as specimens matured, they were plucked away, and new ones filled the gap. The little plot was never full to bursting, but it was also never empty. And things rolled along nicely; through several freezing nights, I saw the garden bounce right back. What a lovely site. But then…
DUN DUN DUN …came the big freeze. With several consecutive nights in the low 20s and several days of never lifting out of freezing temps was too much even for my little cold weather plot. I’d grown overconfident, and I chose to let the garden stand without protection. Nothing survived. Everything green was turned to mush.
And so I learned that all things have their limits. I now have a rough understanding of where the cold tolerance lay for this grouping. In the future, I’ll do a little more to protect my plantings should we endure another spell as extreme as the weather was over the holidays.
For now, the chives are making a comeback, and I suspect the parsley will too. Plus, I popped a little indoor-grown dill sprout in each corner.
Soon it’ll be herb planting time, but for now, ahead of a few rainy days to come, I spread the seed combo again.
And I expect we’ll be eating radishes in about three weeks’ time.