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Gardening Thoughts

Gardening is one of those things that I've always wanted to do but never felt I had enough time for. I had always assumed that to grow a successful garden you would need to put in a lot of time and effort to plant, water, weed. I also assumed that while harvesting was the fun part it was something you'd only get to do for a few weeks toward the end of the growing season. I was wrong.

A few years ago I was a backer of a Kickstarter project called the Nourish Mat, which provides a nice template for planting along with seeds to get you started. It even has a hose attachment to get water to the plants in the amounts that they need. For one reason or another I never got around to actually using it. This spring as I was thinking about what I'd like to have done by the end of the summer I thought of gardening and remembered the Nourish Mat which had been languishing in my closet.

At this point the garden has done amazingly well. I started off planting just the spinach, arugula, radishes and cilantro. In just over a month I've harvested 13 radishes (with more coming) and more greens then I've known what to do with (ended up giving some away to my mom). I've only watered the bed twice, done zero weeding, and have spend 95% of my gardening time harvesting food.

There is something immensely satisfying about picking food from my garden and eating it within 15 minutes of picking. At the current rate of growth I can eat a salad about every other day. I just started planting the rest of the seeds that came with my mat and am a little worried about whether or not I'll be able to keep up with all the harvesting next month.

The spinach not only grows as fast as I can pick it, but also huge! I haven't seen spinach leaves this big even in the CSAs I've been a part of in the past. At some point I should probably do a longer writeup about how I set up the garden, but my first impressions now is that gardening is way easier then I could have predicted. The hardest part has literally just been keeping up with the harvesting. Here's a short gallery with some more pictures of what I've grown so far.

[TBD Gallery link here]

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on May 28, 2016 1:08 PM.

The previous post in this blog was Warrior Dash.

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