Wednesday 6 March 2013

Am i going to screw this up?

It was suggested to me that maybe i should start a blog about my adventures with my garden, so i figured i would give it a whirl.
I never in a million years dreamed i would ever be a farmer or want to be a farmer, i sadly assumed i would be a famous artist. Art school is a hell of a drug. Turns out the world of art is not for me, there is far too much bullshit for my liking. After a few years of basically just existing and attempting to put some sort of dent in my student loans i had the brilliant idea to become a pastry chef. I love baking and i love eating baking, what better thing for me to do with my life, right? Wrong, after working with chef's for a few years i started to get sick, REALLY, REALLY sick. My stomach was constantly upset, i threw up regularly, i had no energy, and every time i ate something i felt like i was going to die. Turns out i had contracted C-Difficile, and i didn't get the regular C-Diff that everyone else gets; oh no, i got the crazy strain that wouldn't go away and couldn't give a shit about anti biotics.
A year and a half i was on my couch half dead just waiting to die, to be honest at times i wished for death. The whole thing was excruciating and i wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. At the end of my ordeal i went to see a doctor in Toronto because i still wasn't feeling very good at all, we did some tests and it turns out that i'm a celiac. Life is strange sometimes, you think you're on your path and then a giant crater opens and it forces you to turn back. So that one piece of information from my doctor changed my entire path in life.
After i got back from the doctor i decided i would start growing my own food, and since my fiance is Italian and we eat enough tomatoes to sink a ship i figured i would grow tomatoes.
Now i have this problem where if i'm going to do something i usually won't do it on a small scale. So i asked my parents if i could carve out a piece of their backyard to use as a garden, they agreed and i got to work. I got a backhoe and dug up a 55ft x 65ft plot, in retrospect this is huge and i probably bit off more then i could chew but i had no idea what the hell i was doing so it didn't really matter. I purchased some top soil and had it trucked in for me, i tilled it, made my mounds, put up my 'anti terrorist' fence (which by the way is basically just snow fence to keep my dogs out). Months prior to this i had started my tomatoes in my mothers shitty plastic greenhouses from Canadian Tire, it didn't go as well as planned but i still had 532 tomato plants sprout.
So finally it was time to plant the tomatoes, i stuff them in the ground in neat lovely rows and waited. Now my whole life i have worked with flowers and gardens but never vegetables, so when i realized i couldn't just spray a bunch of chemicals on them i was kind of at a loss. I figured that there would probably be enough awesome shit in the soil to grow my tomatoes, man was i wrong. A good portion of my plants didn't do a thing all year, however a few of them produced a large amount of tomatoes. In the end i got roughly about 15lbs from 532 plants, if i was an actual farmer i would have starved to death.
This year i vow to not screw this up...hopefully.

Here are two photo's of last year's garden.



4 comments:

  1. looks nice, man. at least you got the dough to buy the topsoil thing. i be working in the third world. well we're both new to this.

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    1. I had to purchase some top soil. I dug up the area i wanted to use as a garden and it was 100% clay. Shit was hard as hell, i could hardly till it. Most expensive stuff i have ever purchased, thinking about the bill gives me heart palpitations. Do you have photo's of your garden? i would love to see it.

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  2. I'm so happy to see your blog, Brianna. You are hella funny and have so much to share about gardening and life. Our class really appreciated your visit. You had us in stitches in the Sault!

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    1. Thank you so much! Your comment made my morning. I had a blast talking to you guys, i'm really glad you enjoyed it.

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