Garden Novelty

I grow tired of routines. I thrive in new situations, relishing the unknown. I derive deep joy in building new friendships and making new connections.

I’m growing more and more certain this is exactly why gardening has outlasted many friendships. It never gets old, and easily keeps my undivided attention.

Each spring I can — and often do — reinvent myself.

Try new things. Garden in different ways, with different plants. And new interplantings. Build trellises in new ways. Succession plant even more unconventionally. Compost my 25 years of experience and plant it anew.

Gardening will remain new beyond my lifetime. The newness is what a garden thrives on. Seeds emerging and promising a future.

With this newness I took on 4” soil blocks this spring. One MGG member questioned why I don’t use them, and an attendee from one of my local talks this winter shared that she uses them and loves them.

These two interactions were enough impetus to return to the unruly technology that I had borrowed from my friend Joe back in 2019 only to send it back to Georgia after a few unsuccessful attempts.

It’s not an inexpensive garden gadget and because I’d failed years ago, I was reluctant to try again. But I figured the only way to grow was to questions what you consider a tried and true method. Sometimes questioning them brings you back to your initial way of being, but it’s possible you will build new pathways too.

With this curiosity and a commitment to give this technology many trials this season, I used them for some of my determinate paste tomatoes (Italian Romas); the other paste tomatoes went into newspaper pots. In hindsight I’d have planted them earlier because you can’t plant them deeply.

I also used them for some of my celery and artichokes. It is taking some time to get used to making them, but I may have convinced myself this is a superior pot to my larger newspaper pots.

More on making this coming soon, but they didn’t really save time I don’t think. The amount of care needed to mix the soil to the right wetness (it’s much soupier than my regular soil blocks) I believe negated any time needed to fold larger pots.

That being said, these are probably 50% deeper than my newspaper pots. And that is significant.

I’m enjoying watching my cucurbits sprout in these, marveling at the opportunity to reinvent my garden rituals.