Double Trouble

     Something was up. My husband started looking at the seed catalogs at the beginning of August with great vigor, when the tomatoes were still green on the vine and the sweet corn was still forming its ears. It was unusual, as the last two years it was in early-winter we looked over seed catalogs quasi-together and he mentioned a couple of things he would like to grow, but most of the garden planning had been left up to me and my inventories and figures of how much we would need of certain crops for the coming year. So I shouldn't have been too shocked when one night he proclaimed, "I want to double the size of the garden." 

     I can’t remember exactly what I said in reply to this other then at first silence, followed by the word “crazy” screamed and uttered a number of times, intermixed with other words of bewilderment, outrage and sarcasm. You have to understand that we have a bit of garden space already (more than I feel we can reasonably keep up with). Our main garden is 2,964 square feet, jammed packed with so many vegetables that a rot-o-tiller cannot reasonably fit between all the rows, so we’re forced to hand-weed nearly everything; a proposition we don’t have the time for.  (Even with the help of my loving teenage cousin from North Carolina who willingly gives up a part of her summer vacation each year for us, we still fall desperately behind.  I think she would enjoy a summer vacation where weeding the garden is minimal and us doing craft projects is a higher priority.)  

A less weedy angle of our main garden in August of this year, around the
time the Mr. started to page through the catalogs.  

     Then, there’s the upper garden, another approximately 1,500 square feet, lined with blackberries, black raspberries and elderberries intermixed with cat nip, spearmint and bee balm (and who really knows what else). The outside edge is overrun with berry bushes who are constantly trying to encroach upon the lawn, but the inside is completely coated in weeds. We exterminated most of the pokeweed in the area the previous year (which we’re fortunate of), but there are so many other weeds, it makes the entire upper garden a mess.  (Note: Taking a second look at that space estimate, with the amount of berries that encroached and firmly planted themselves in the lawn, my guess is 1,500 square feet may be a bit of an underestimate.)  

The Upper Garden before the first round of clearing the brush in the autumn
of 2013.  I hate to say it, but two autumns later it still looks like a hot mess to me.

     Then we have to add an additional 30+ square feet of gardening space in various parts of the yard (not to mention the flowerbeds that are running rampant) to contend with. All together, that makes over 4,500 square feet of garden space we have, in varying degrees of maintenance. That’s all I could think about as my dear husband calmly told me that he wanted to double the size of the garden (note this is the main garden’s size he wants to double of course), with an open seed catalog beside him and a laptop screen showing a strange variety of wheat from the Seed Savers Exchange. 

Actually, we used all the cars like pickup trucks as
sometimes things like the root ball still attached to a blue
spruce for my father's flowerbed just wouldn't fit in the
back of an old Corolla.  We drove over an hour like this
from the garden center to his house, only to find out that
a passing rain shower was going to come through before we
could get it unloaded, so we weighed down a shower
curtain with bricks to protect the car's interior.  Since,
believe it or not, this is actually our good car.  Oh, and
well I'm telling you unbelievable things, apparently the
garden center has seen crazier things done.

     “Seriously?!”  I near screamed as the wheat on the screen caught my eye.  I wasn't quite sure I could believe his idea or his reasoning behind the insanity I still clearly saw. “You want wheat? We have no equipment!”  I was frantic by this point.  Keep in mind, at the time, we borrowed the rot-o-tiller from the landlord for the garden so we didn’t have to hand weed everything, the hand-me-down weed whacker had, and still has, a leak in it that seemingly gushes twice as much gasoline as you pour in (so we’re borrowing one of those from him too), the secondhand riding lawn mower, which has a lawn cart (thanks to the in-law’s Easter Bunny) doesn’t always like to start quite right or stop even when you downshift frantically and steer desperately trying to avoid hitting the car, and the hand-me-down pickup truck was given to us as a gift (and promptly broke down the following week on my husband’s way home from work, but it is once again fixed as I fortunately have a fix-it friendly husband). To say we’re lucky having so many people willing to help us with insane dreams is actually a serious understatement, since without them we'd be stuck back in the days of hand-weeding the garden and attempting to use a Toyota Corolla like a pickup truck.  To say we have no equipment other than a handful of gardening tools (Christmas, birthday and other gifts to us) and borrowed and secondhand power equipment would be a painful reminder to sore muscles that get overused from March to November each year.  (See Our New Farm Equipment as an update to his fix for this reasoning I had.)   

   My reasoning, no matter how frantic, did not seem to dissuade him from this ridiculous idea; not immediately, in the first week, or the subsequent ones. By the evening, his list of crops for the garden took up an entire column of college ruled notebook paper, and then it doubled. Skeptically, I added a few of my own crop ideas for good measure (mostly ones we already had seeds for, or could be multiple season crops like rhubarb and huckleberries that might seemingly be less work?). My husband had other ideas: “We need more dried beans if we don’t want to buy any throughout the year… and some gourds to make into dippers and birdhouses would be good… and we can get strawberries! I can just taste the strawberries now.” I’m pretty sure by this point my face must have twisted something fierce. I could see dollar signs, blood, sweat and tears, and here he is dreaming not only of additional animals someday like pigs and turkeys, but an expanding garden for the upcoming year!  A near future project!  I must have married a crazy man… 

      But as I write this, he must have married a just as crazy wife. 

      After weeks and weeks of strong debate, protest and irrational reasoning trying to convince him of the dozens of possible faults in the idea, here I sit as he gathers stakes and a measuring tape to map the edges of our new enlarged garden to begin prepping for spring.  To say it's a large dream of his is an understatement.  To say I'm not completely on board with the whole idea of what almost 7,500 square feet of garden space will mean for the already-limited vacations, nights to rest, and overall limited breaths we're able to take during spring to autumn, is well, an equal understatement, but his determination to make this work and prove to me that we can handle and need the extra garden space is slowly starting to turn me.

Measuring and staking out the new edges.

     It could, in the end, be a great idea, or it could go down in a pile of dirt as a complete failure, but it's up to us to figure that out, with what I'm still foreseeing as potentially the longest gardening season of my life.

     As we glanced towards the newly-laid out garden that evening, at what could be the beginning of a very long next year, we exchanged our final comments on the subject for the evening.

     Me (with a sense of bewilderment): "Geeze, look at the size of that thing!  We're absolutely crazy, aren't we?"

     The Mr. (with an equal sense of assurance, optimism and adventure): "Think of all the fresh produce we'll get next year.

     Me: "Think of all the work..."