Sharing Success in a Vegetable Garden
This is a story read by me in my Mother Earth News magazine. I summarized the main thoughts.
In April, 2007, after a lot of house hunting, the family of Jim and Rosita Preston moved into a small house on a half-acre lot in Harlingen, Texas. They liked the quiet and the mature neighborhood. They wanted a big back yard for gardening—fruit trees, shade trees, etc. They soon found out the downside to the new place was the alkaline-clay soil, in other words, a “brickyard”. They were not discouraged, so they started a small garden. The hardest part of getting started was the initial tilling of the soil for the garden. The first year’s garden was pretty small. They added a lot of organic materials in the way of manure and compost. With every spring and fall planting, the garden expanded, and gradually the soil improved as they continually added compost, manure and sand. In the second gardening year, they started sharing the garden with another family. They found this garden sharing approach worked and extremely well. They initially decided they should all equally share the labor responsibilities and cleanup, but after a few months, they realized it wasn’t practical to keep score for who was doing how much. Everyone contributed what labor and resources they could, whenever they could, and that seemed to work out for then all. Everyone benefited from both the friendship and the healthy, homegrown foods. Now could we not all do some of this sharing?
In April, 2007, after a lot of house hunting, the family of Jim and Rosita Preston moved into a small house on a half-acre lot in Harlingen, Texas. They liked the quiet and the mature neighborhood. They wanted a big back yard for gardening—fruit trees, shade trees, etc. They soon found out the downside to the new place was the alkaline-clay soil, in other words, a “brickyard”. They were not discouraged, so they started a small garden. The hardest part of getting started was the initial tilling of the soil for the garden. The first year’s garden was pretty small. They added a lot of organic materials in the way of manure and compost. With every spring and fall planting, the garden expanded, and gradually the soil improved as they continually added compost, manure and sand. In the second gardening year, they started sharing the garden with another family. They found this garden sharing approach worked and extremely well. They initially decided they should all equally share the labor responsibilities and cleanup, but after a few months, they realized it wasn’t practical to keep score for who was doing how much. Everyone contributed what labor and resources they could, whenever they could, and that seemed to work out for then all. Everyone benefited from both the friendship and the healthy, homegrown foods. Now could we not all do some of this sharing?