Everything begins somewhere. My gardening experience started when I was a child helping my mom and younger siblings plant a garden in sunny southern California--where there are two seasons: the sunny season and the rainy season. My medic experience began Spring 2009--not long after I was first one scene when my youngest brother was hit by a car in front of our house and broke his arm.
I didn't realize how much I'd miss gardening until I left for college in Virginia. Within two months I had a pansy growing on my windowsill. Six months later I had a small herb garden and a long-suffering African Violet. During my second year of college, I started volunteering with a local rescue squad and became an EMT. I loved learning about the anatomy and physiology, but unfortunately, they didn't cover enough of it to satisfy my curiosity. So after graduating from college and volunteer fire school (yay for being a smallish girl in turnout gear kneeling on top of the hose to control it), I got a job with a local ambulance transport company, moved into a small condo with two friends from college, and went to school for EMT-Intermediate Spring of '13 and graduated last summer. Finally I learned more about anatomy and physiology! To help deal with the stress of class, I started running and expanded my small potted garden. My schedule was ridiculous, and I only had a few hours here and there to work on the garden.
Last year, the garden began with a packet of tomato seeds. I found a dwarf tomato variety that was perfect for a pot. This is a different variety, but ended up in a pot on my patio as well.
Our condo is on the ground floor and includes an approximately 8x10 ft concrete patio outside a sliding glass door. There was a small area of grass between our patio and a neighbors patio (3.5x4ft) that I decided to turn into a small vegetable patch.
As soon as the ground thawed in February, I started by removing the top layer of sod. Turned out there was a 6in layer of gravel 4in beneath that layer of sod...yay. It took me two months to painstakingly pick out pieces of gravel out so I could dig up another 8in of soil.
Sometime in May, I found a beat up old rocking chair by the dumpster in the apartment complex. It soon had a permanent home on my patio. It was so relaxing to come home after Intermediate class or a long hospital rotation, go for a run on the trail, spend half an hour working on the garden, and then sit in the rocking chair watching the sunset and the fireflies after dinner.
By the end of the summer, I had about thirty-eight pots of varying sizes containing a variety of flowers and vegetables.
I choose to use a mixture of organic and commercial fertilizer and pest control products. They worked for the most part, but I still had a big problem with mealy bugs. A swallowtail caterpillar made it's home in my Parsley and two praying mantises took up residence in the garden in April, and helped with pest control.
In late June, I started to get my first harvests. The most difficult thing was keeping everything watered. There is no outside hose. So it was a daily thirty-minute chore to haul the requisite eight gallons of water using a watering can (I have two of them: a 1/2 gallon and 2 gallon) from the kitchen sink to the garden.
By August, the place was starting to get overgrown. The tomatoes were too tall for their stakes--eventually breaking the stakes and my zucchini plants were trying to knock down the little wire fence surrounding them.
My cucumbers had reached the top of their trellis and were going down the other side. I started giving produce away because my roommates and I couldn't eat it before it went bad.
By October, pretty much everything I'd planted was done. By then I was precepting as a medic at work and with my volunteer rescue squad, had just begun an Intermediate to Paramedic bridge course and was taking a condensed (8-week) college level Anatomy & Physiology class. The cold weather had killed off most of the annuals, so I left the pots sitting out for the winter.
As soon as the ground thaws enough for me to dig in it, (hopefully later this month) I'll start turning it over getting ready for planting in the spring. I can't wait.
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