By Aileen Liu
To be perfectly honest, I’ve never had much of a green thumb. I got an aloe plant about a year ago, figuring that because it’s a succulent it wouldn’t be too difficult to take care of. Within a month it was almost dead :). So, I ended up giving custody of my little aloe plant to my mom so she could nurse it back to health with her other thriving plants.
After that fiasco, I was very much reluctant to touch the garden my mom was planning for the summer. She was sprouting random seeds from fruits and vegetables we got from the grocery store (I was very surprised they were still viable), getting seedlings from her friends, and spending hours at the English Gardens examining their pots and plants. Not much later, she brought a prickly yellow ball of something in from the small garden she’d started outside. It looked like a burr that had just forgotten to stop growing. She told me to grab a knife and cut it open. Not sure what to expect from this horror show of a plant, I cut into it and discovered a cucumber. (Turns out it’s called a lemon cucumber - search it up it’s weird.) I couldn’t exactly just ignore the garden after that.
Mostly, I’ve just been helping my mom out by watering the plants every day (with water from the basement dehumidifier because Save the Earth), checking for weeds or pests, and just watching the plants grow. I haven’t been doing this long but one very helpful tip for anyone trying to start a garden - get a friend or family member to help you so that on the days you forget to water your plants, they don’t die! It’s been so cool seeing the plants I took care of over the past few months start to flower and produce actual, tangible food. As of now, the bounty is still pretty small, especially since we’re still working on ways to stop the squirrels from eating everything, but it’s been an amazing learning experience.
Also, as a note to anyone trying to start a garden but without much backyard space to plant, planting using pots or hydroponics systems (inside or out) is really useful. My backyard doesn’t have many places to plant a garden - other than a small patch of dirt where we recently had a tree removed - so my mom and I have been planting some newer plants in pots. This not only saves backyard space, but it also lets us bring the plants inside once the weather starts getting colder. This edamame plant, for example, does much better in warmer climates, so when the weather starts dropping, we can bring it inside! As for hydroponics, I’m planning on starting an herb garden inside, which can not only brighten your cooking, but looks real nice :). (And if you’re interested in starting your own cheap and efficient hydroponics garden, check out some of our articles on hydroponics!)