Vox Limax: UCSC Talks About Home Gardening

April showers bring May flowers as well as July tomatoes, August snap peas, and September potatoes! As the days grow longer and warmer, Santa Cruz's green thumbs dive into black soil to sow sweet and savory summer crops! But others are not getting down-and-dirty with home gardening for a variety of reasons ranging from incompatible living situations, lack of knowledge about gardening, or tight budgets.

So this month we ask:

Why do you or why don’t you have a garden. If you do garden, what do you grow and what inspired you to get started? If you don’t, what factors prevent you from gardening?

"Ever since I was really young my grandparents have really loved gardening. Their entire backyard is full of all different types of plants. They grow apples, they raise succulents. If you walk through their garden, everywhere you go is like a forest because of how much foliage there is. They have bougainvilleas, they have peppers, they have mints and different herbs. It's really neat! They've devoted a lot of time to it!

My entire family also likes planting flowers and things like that, which I think is cool. If I do have my own place one day I think I'll definitely start planting my own stuff. Something I'm really fascinated by is vegetative propagation - being able to eat part of a plant, plant the rest and grow it again. That concept is really neat. 

My family have always been big proponents of having plants in the house, so I think growing a garden will come naturally if I ever have the capacity to make one.  Also, I think sustainability and sustenance are really important in gardening too because being able to grow fresh food is especially important in marginalized communities because they may not have access to fresh foods in general because they're so pricey in stores. So I think gardens (especially community gardens) are a really great way to allow for low-income and marginalized communities to come together and foster a space of sustenance, health, nutrition, and growth." - Katherine (Politics, Legal Studies)

"I don’t have a garden because I live in an apartment on the second floor. I guess we have a balcony [where we could put a garden box] but seeing as we struggle to take care of the house, I don’t think we could keep a garden alive." - Anonymous

"I don't garden because of a lack of space (I live on campus) and a lack of time. I also don't know much about gardening, but I guess that's easily remedied." - Kaio (Computer Science)

"One day, we found one of our snap peas rotting in the bag.  So we thought, 'Let's put it in one of these containers and it will grow!' And so we emptied out our soy sauce bottle and we put some water in there and we put the bean inside and 5 weeks later he's sprouting! His name is Ben. One day I found cilantro next to Ben. My housemate got it at the Earth Day festival. We also have a succulent... I don't know its name." - Sarina (Environmental Studies, Biology)







"I did have a little garden that I sprouted. I was going to transplant them into a larger pot.  Then one morning I was watering them - loving them and taking care of them. They were all in this little carton and they all dropped out of my hands! It was very hard to save them and now they're dead.

But I have a fern and its name is Iz. Iz is doing great." - Alina (Environmental Studies)