Flowers

Funny thing has happened this year… I seem to be more interested in flowers than veggies. Well, more specifically, I’m more interested in the holistic garden environment than just producing food. Not sure what that’s about, but I also actually purchased more mason bees, and I’m considering starting a beehive.

I think that it’s not so much that I’m not interested in veggies as I’m starting to see how forcing this annual cropping in isolation is difficult and frustrating. Diversity– not only in varieties but in insects, types of plants, terrain, micro-climates, etc.– yields a more stable, more pleasant garden. Focusing on which variety of tomato to plant neglects the complicated chain (even chain implies one dimension) that supports the web of interactions that make a garden more healthy and self-maintaining.

This dawned on me as I was out in the greenhouse looking at what I’d started, and I realized that the closest I’d come to a vegetable so far was chard. Otherwise, it’s calendula, milkweed, alyssum, poppies, marigolds, etc.

It’s not that I’m not going to do veggies. Last year, I created a situation in which there was rarely a need to buy produce. I’d like to do that again.

But this year I want to do smaller volumes of more varieties. I’m going to plant more insectary type stuff within the bounds of the “farm.” I’m also going to spend a little more effort attracting insects and other desirable critters.

Hopefully, it won’t be too long until its photo season again, and I can show off the realization of some of my late winter theory.