Every once in awhile, I take a step back and am curious what other people actually think of our gardening methods. Although we certainly do practice some “traditional” methods, every once in awhile I’m struck by how radically different some of our gardening practices could look to an outsider.
When I started gardening, however many decades ago, I never thought that I’d be pioneering new gardening methods. I didn’t foresee building engineered gardens, nor synthesizing soil and hydroponic based methods to achieve maximum performance. I didn’t ever think I’d ponder pH or the micro-organism load in container grown plants. I definitely never saw a social media effort, heck I barely talk about growing food with friends and colleagues! There was a time, a long time ago, where I just put bags of compost on the ground and quietly grew plants.
But then there’s the life decisions we’ve made that also radically shifted our path. For example, had I never pursued off-grid gardening, it’s very unlikely we’d be pursuing concepts like fertigation, sub irrigation and extreme water conservation. Had we never moved to the subarctic, I wouldn’t understand the impact of temperature on soils like I do today, much less how to optimize those equations.
Most of the stuff we’ve pursued has been based on theory. It’s all well and good to think about possible methods and what might be good practices. However, most anything one might do will have marginal impacts, if any at all. It really takes testing and seeing how things work across multiple seasons. It takes trials and comparisons to see if something “actually” works better.
The early days of Frosty Garden were a darker time for us, back when we were pitting ourselves against those trials and tests. We weren’t confident. We didn’t know if this stuff worked or if it performed better or worse. Fortunately, almost all of you weren’t “here” then…and boy are we glad about that! Today, you get to enjoy the benefits of our decade of pitting ourselves against subarctic growing, constantly trying new things out to see if they “actually” do better.
But, even today, we’re still advancing that knowledge. Like with our hydroponic experiments. We’re even still putting container growing methods against one another! We’re still shifting our fertilizers and making fundamental changes to the decisions we make about our practices.
What I am glad for, though, is that at one point in my life I decided to pick up growing. At the time, it was intimidating as all get out. But, I learned from my failures, over and over. Yet, I got back up, tried again and kept learning. Which, that set the stage for understanding. That understanding has led to an ability to synthesize knowledge, to cross boundaries when it comes to methods and really pursue some interesting stuff in an interesting place to grow.
I’m also glad you all are here, too. And we hope that you get to learn some stuff, just like we are. I hope I can get better at trying to take along our gardening journey as it has ended up in places I never expected. But, in the end, a tomato is still a tomato!
