For the past several years, I’ve been planting a small garden here at our place in northeast Kansas: several tomatoes and peppers, a row or two of sweet corn, some strawberries, and a new effort this year with honeydew melons. There’s some competition for the fruits of my labors with the rabbits and the squirrels but generally it’s been worth the trouble. A fair amount of that trouble stems from the fact that our garden used to be a parking lot.

It’s downright challenging boring holes through the asphalt and concrete to plant stuff but it does help with weed control.

Just kidding, folks; there’s no concrete or asphalt. But there is a lot of gravel. After all, it was a gravel parking lot. Literally.

Back in the Eighties and Nineties, this place served as a Bed-and-Breakfast. With a gravel parking lot for the guests. And, all factors considered, that parking lot was the best location for our garden. Lots of sunshine, out of the primary traffic zones, and not interfering with horse pasture capacity.

Best location, yessir. Except for the gravel.

The gravel was covered—for the most part—with a couple of decades of scrub grass and a thin layer of translocated dirt from heavy rains slightly uphill. But with the acquisition of a single bottom plow, I’ve been able to invert the layers of sifted dirt and gravel each season. Added several hundred pounds of composted horse manure and a few pounds of herbicide at timely intervals.

While not rich in organic matter, it is well drained and the tomatoes and peppers like that. Other than the unseemly appearance of all that gravel throughout our little garden, it seems to work pretty well. Except for when I’m trying to install the wire tomato cages that support the plants and help keep them from spreading out horizontally.

Sometimes, I’ll hit a rock within the first inch or two of trying to push the wire rods into the dirt. Other times, I’ll get down five or six inches deep before one of the rods refuses to go any further. Pull the whole thing up, rotate it a couple of inches and try again. Sometimes repeat that process several times. And in at least two cases last year, give up and leave the tomato plant to its own devices.

Yes, it’s a lot more work than it would be gardening in a spot with ten inches of rich topsoil and no rocks. Definitely more frustrating.

Not all of our planting in life is in the easy places. Not all of it yields the way we’d like for it to. Sometimes, it’s more prudent to give up and seek a better setting for our best efforts. But what I’ve learned here is that persistent effort and stubborn faith, combined with the blessing of the One who sends both rain and sun, can bring forth a yield even from the hard places. I’d have to say some of the best tomatoes I’ve ever tasted were grown in an old parking lot…

H. Arnett

6/19/2023