Vegetable Gardening

After Mom passed, Dad and I swore to keep up her garden. He's been doing most of it while I was going to work and helping with the heavy stuff. After my job ended I helped more. Merely keeping it up wasn't that challenging and Mom always looked for improvements. We did too, so have planted various things.

The two of us planted squash and tomatoes and we've been looking after other plants. We originally had lettuce in the greenhouse but once daily temps passed 100'F in there, they were wilted to death so we gave that up and just buy it now. When Fall comes, we'll plant more stuff in there. The big surprise was the squash. Once we lost a pair of trees (oak died first, then the cedar blew over) to termites and strong winds, that let enough sun through to make plants there grow like mad. Since termites don't care for live non-woody plants, the squash is doing great. We've harvested many zucchini this summer, and we ate the first of the big heritage tomatoes last evening on our salads. Very good. Wish we'd planted more.

Despite all the iron, the soil is very productive when you water your plants. The house is in the middle of undeveloped iron ore deposit, fairly common for the Western Sierra Foothills. After all, below us are gold mines, and there's arsenic and tin and silver there too. If you weren't aware, this is pretty common for metals in a metamorphic rock series, much less pegmatites in hardrock, since the silicates tend to concentrate after reacting out the iron and manganese into Olivine and Pyroxene and eventually Biotite and Muscovite mica before Second Boiling bursts and cracks the rock to deposit long crystal quartz and actual metals like gold etc. You see it all over the place where Granite is exposed. If you use Google Earth and highlight Highway 49 in California, you can follow the track of the actual gold to the crest of the sierra, then track Highway 89  to the northwest and follow it over into the Shasta-Trinity area. The rocks change, but the gold is still there.

Where there is water, and careful gardeners, you can grow decent veggies. Raised beds where there's arsenic, but otherwise veggies do fine. Apparently pot growers like it here too, but I'm not one of those. Our grapes are less than stellar, putting most of their energy into growing vine wood since it was up against the fence we rebuilt last year, but next year, if we are careful not to over-prune, it should make more grapes. These are either chardonnay or chenin blanc, based on their size and color. Dad may surprise me with some other varietal, however. It might be Reisling. Serious vintners usually start by buying grapes and making wine, but then start planting their own to lower costs. It kinda doesn't work that way, but that's mostly a matter of the cost of water pumping and the amount of labor needed for a good grape yield per acre. Its not like I want to stay in place and be a farmer, because they always get screwed by govt and taxes and you need decades of investment to repay the loan that bought the place. Grapes aren't a commodity, since there's too much quality variation and too many kinds of grapes which produce very different wines. Its not like rice or wheat.

Down on the flatland, where you can get cheap enough Spanish-speaking labor, you can grow veggies in large enough lots to wholesale at a good price. For the rest of us, planting veggie in our yards? Labor costs are what time we can spare, and yields are usually tied to water and fertilizer spent on each plant. The big upside to growing veggies yourself is pride, sharing with your neighbors, and eating those veggies for dinner. Fresh picked they do taste excellent. I hope the little rain they got last night makes the plants that much happier today.