A Black Thumb Tries To Go Green

By Nicole Bowman-Layton Albemarle Magazine

Robert Layton compares a sunflower to his height during a recent visit to the Laytons' Victory Garden. His sister calls it the “survive the apocalypse garden.” The tallest sunflowers, as of late June, were over 6 feet tall.

Photos by Nicole Bowman-Layton/ Albemarle Magazine

When word of Governor Roy Cooper’s stay-at-home order was announced in March, my first thought was: How am I going to feed everyone?

Our family of five people and two dogs planned to start a garden anyway, but the executive order gave us more of a reason to get things going and expand our effort.

When planning a home garden, you need to figure out what areas get the most sunlight. If you live near the water, you also may need to think about flooding. One side of our yard is filled with trees lining a fence.

While I live a good quarter mile from the water, our backyard has been known to flood during heavy rains. I learned through a tour of the Iredell house a few streets up from my home in Edenton that in the 1700s and up to the early 1900s, our backyard used to be where a creek was. The waterway went from where the current Queen Anne Creek and Edenton Bay meet, behind the 1767 Courthouse, all the way to where the U.S. Post Office is now on Broad Street. It was also a former gravel parking lot, which is evident by how my carrots look all twisted and gnarled, unlike their straight store-bought cousins.

In fact, a flash flood washed out the first garden I ever planted at our home. The day after the flood, I found a few of the baby plants and put them in pots. They did OK, but not like they would have if they had room to spread out.

But we keep trying, especially this year. We hoped the garden could supplement our grocery store shopping, so we could save money and spread out our trips during the pandemic. It’s still early in the summer, so we’ll see.

This year, we’ve enlisted help from various extension offices and Facebook groups dedicated to victory gardens, or as my daughter calls it, our “survive the apocalypse” garden. Thanks to the local extension office, I was able to connect with an Extension service in Florida that put together a Victory Garden program that has been very helpful in helping me identify pests and other problems with my plants. Apparently, you shouldn’t plant mint straight into the ground or it will take over your garden.

My rule of thumb is to just leave stuff alone and let nature do its thing. However, that doesn’t always work out. We have some volunteers -- remnants from pumpkins, watermelon and decorative fall gourds -- that I just threw in the garden when we were done with them. It seems like every single seed sprouted sometime this spring, so I had to separate the plants out to other spots, remove some and hope that we get some gourds on the vines this season.

The other volunteers we have are squirrels. They dug up some of the seeds I space out in the garden plot and bury them wherever they want to for the fall and winter. And they seem to be better gardeners than I am. Their plants have sprouted all over our lawn in little clusters here and there. My patient husband/lawn maintenance crew dutifully mowed around the squirrels’ gardens. In fact, one of our biggest and most thriving plants is a pumpkin vine the squirrels planted.

I learned through the extension agencies and books to be a little more watchful of the garden. Like a farmer once told me, “You never learn how to do something well until your life depends on it.” I took this to heart this year, as we make our way through this new normal.

I think the most rewarding part about the garden is sharing it with the kids. They like hunting through the leaves looking for fruit and vegetables to eat fresh off the plant -- even though I’ve warned them against the practice. When we drive past fields in rural North Carolina, they seem to appreciate the fact that they know what corn, peanuts cotton and soybeans look like in their natural form and the work that goes into getting stuff ready to harvest.

This little plot of dirt is our victory. We are learning something new -- how to successfully grow fruit, herbs, flowers and vegetables and we get to enjoy the results of our hard work. Hopefully, we’ll be able to expand that knowledge for years and generations to come.

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