Garden Update

I've been asked about my guerrilla garden. (I called it a 'squatter garden' until my brother told me about the guerrilla gardening movement.) Well, here is the rather disappointing story of how the garden is doing.

The first thing that happened was that some animal ate every single thing I planted, no matter what it was. They ate strange and unexpected things that I didn't think were edible - for instance, the entire body of the sunflower plants. I knew the sunflower seeds were edible, but they ate the entire stems and leaves and flowers. I planted a few other things, but some of them got hit with the herbicide spray when the township did maintenance on the road.

(Whatever this animal is, it's really tough, because something also ate the tops off my St. John's Wort plants, which are in a pot up in the woods. St. John's Wort is poisonous if you eat large amounts of raw green leaves, so it had to be a large animal like a deer. When you eat it, you feel horribly sick almost instantly after only a bite or two - I know from personal experience, because when I first started growing it, I nibbled a tiny piece of a leaf and regretted it immediately. I thought I would have to go to the hospital - don't ever eat the leaves! I simply could not believe it when I saw that the SJW had been eaten!)

I had a short fence around the garden because I believed that it would be eaten mainly by groundhogs or rabbits. But it turned out that actually, there are also whitetail deer roaming the area. I saw them sometimes near the garden. They would have easily reached right over the short fence.

I hesitated to build a solid, large, tall fence high enough to block the deer. I had a vague uneasiness or anxiety about 'being too visible' and also about investing too much money. I didn't want to use expensive materials, for instance, durable fenceposts made of metal, if my garden was vulnerable to being taken down by maintenance people.

Also, it turned out that that location is just a very shallow soil on top of a layer of immovable, impenetrable rocks. This made it very difficult to bury fenceposts deep enough to prevent them from falling over. I could only put in short, lightweight fenceposts, but I suspected that any heavier or taller posts would fall over due to the shallow depth.

So after being frustrated by those setbacks, and then, after getting involved in other things, I abandoned the garden to the weeds all year. The weeds grew very high, and of course, the deer wouldn't eat them!

On a whim, I threw out some bags of dried beans that were sitting in my kitchen because they were really old and I wasn't even attempting to cook them. Some of them sprouted, and they began to grow, buried deep within the tall weeds.

But immediately, somebody selectively browsed through the weeds, located the sprouting beans, and ate every single one of the plants all the way down to the ground! The surrounding weeds didn't even provide enough camouflage to protect the beans.

I have some seeds for various vegetables sitting in a bag. I haven't planted them yet, but I do still intend to. I think that I will do it whenever I have made a more secure location, where the soil is diggable enough that I can put a deep and strong fence around it. I have a general idea where I might build this garden, however I'm not sure whether they spray that area with herbicides for maintenance. (I DO know that they spray my entire area with gypsy moth killer, and I'm not happy about it.) It's up underneath some electrical power lines in the woods just above my house. The area is a long, empty, grassy line going all the way across the hill. I know that they do SOME kind of maintenance to keep it free of brush, and if they spray herbicides, then it's a bad location. But I don't see anybody going there doing anything, so it's being relatively ignored.

Just recently, the maintenance people were working in the area where my original squatter garden was, and they took down some of it. I had been partially taking down my fence, on my own, but I had left the fence lying there. They took the fence away, probably thinking that it could be a dangerous, non-biodegradable piece of garbage - which I agree with - because it's a thin plastic netting, and they must have believed that somebody totally abandoned the garden and nobody was watching over it at all. So the thin plastic netting would have been one of those things that's dangerous to animals or dangerous if it gets washed away in the stream, and that kind of thing. I know they've taken photos of animals that got strangled in those loops that hold together six packs of soda, for instance. So in a way I understood what they were probably thinking when they took away the plastic fence.

I myself went in, and took down the rest of my wooden fenceposts. The plastic netting and the little wooden posts were just cheap little things I bought at Wal-Mart and Lowe's. Some of the wooden fence posts had also been taken away when they took the plastic fence, but some of them were left there.

I also removed the stones. I had surrounded the base of the fence with medium-sized stones from the stone pile. I threw them all back into the pile, so that the lawnmowers could mow over that soil again without hitting rocks.

I'm kind of annoyed, but kind of understanding - I anticipated that somebody would take it down after I abandoned it to the weeds. It just looked so ugly and wasn't growing anything useful. The only garden-like thing about it was that it was a patch of tall weeds surrounded by a fence. It vaguely resembled a piece of property that was being used. You could tell that somebody had attempted to do something there at some time in the past.

The frustration that I feel is also a very general and abstract frustration, at all of the forces and phenomena that make it difficult and expensive for non-rich people to buy and own their own land, without going very deeply into debt for a very long time. The inflation of land prices, the property taxes, the fact that it all has to be processed through government paperwork and the fact that the government is involved with it at all - all of that annoys me, in a general way. And I felt that feeling whenever I saw that the maintenance people had decided to partially dismantle the fence. And I also felt it because my own life is just not working out as well as I would like, due to problems with chronic fatigue, so it was difficult to expend the necessary energy to work hard at finding solutions to the garden problems.

However, this is not the end of the disappointing gardening story. As I said, I do have a new location in mind. I need to check the soil to see whether it's the same - whether it's a shallow soil on top of immovable rocks. I think it MUST be a better soil, because it's part of a forested area, and the trees would have been growing through the soil, so they wouldn't have been blocked by a layer of rocks. So I'm pretty sure the soil won't be that bad at the new location - it'll be easier to dig deep into, so I can make a strong, deer-proof fence.

The rocky layer down below, at my original garden, is probably there because I was gardening on a totally manmade location. It's a built-up pile of land next to an artificial pond, next to a rockpile that is part of a concrete dam that the water spills over. The whole area is artificial. Now that I know about it, it makes sense: they would have just piled up a lot of rocks and then put soil on top of them.

Actually, what I really wished for was a tool that could break through rocks without using dynamite or anything noisy and dangerous. I've fantasized about digging a hole or underground tunnel, for various reasons (where am I going to hide my gold and silver coins when and if my collection gets big enough to steal?).

And I've wondered about shallow, small-scale mineral mining, since there is a lot of iron ore in this area. If people could do shallow iron mining, they could do small-scale, individual blacksmith work, the old-fashioned way. We wouldn't need a big government loan to open a huge corporation to do it. It would be just little local crafters doing their own thing.

But that's a little farther in the future. For me personally, right now, I'm going to just avoid the impenetrable rocky layer, and try out the better area above, for the next garden attempt. This will probably happen next spring.

So, that's the state of things.