A Suburban Forager Starts a Garden 🌱

Can convening with plants renew the creative process? I’m about to find out.

I am in a kind of writerly limbo at the moment, so I’ve decided to give my scribe-brain a break and see if I can grow food.

It is spring in Orkney and I have begun to plant a garden using the ‘no dig’ method of laying down cardboard and soil on top of the sad lawn that was growing on the wee patch of ground out back of my house. It’s mostly concrete, but the two squares of lawn actually have fertile clay soil beneath that sterile layer—I just don’t have the spoons to dig it all up!

I have planted carrots and black kale, radishes and beets in grow bags and raised beds. Kind people on the internet have sent me variegated kale, leeks, fen nettle and wild strawberry. I have started some yarrow and moved some foxglove volunteers to a more suitable spot.

I have never done this before…it is a learning curve, especially in the maritime, northern climate of Orkney. Some people grew up with a garden and were taught how to do it. In Britain there is a passion for gardening but I always perceived of it as a posh hobby—something off limits. I’ve been a renter for most of my life. In the US you might be able to plant on rented land but in the UK that isn’t the case. If anything, in my experience, landlords expect you to tend their decorative garden as part of your obligation as a tenant.

I’ve realised that this is my house and I get to do what I want with the sterile back garden. Could I make it less sterile? Emboldened, I began with plant friends and am branching out. Wild garlic is flourishing in the dark corner of the garden—I’m eating that with ground elder (another prolific volunteer) that I make into pesto or ‘back garden tabouleh’.

I have a bag of trash—’green’ and ‘brown’ compost—that I roll around, hoping it will at some point turn into usable dirt.

From a chronic illness and energy limiting condition standpoint, gardening uses up a lot of spoons but somehow also creates spoons.

Are you an avid gardener? How did you start? What were your easiest wins, starting out.

So far I’ve found these resources and the gardeners behind them immensely helpful!

https://www.foodforest.garden/

https://www.seedsofscotland.com/

And this Youtube channel is better than a life coach:

https://www.youtube.com/@GrowVeg