Behind The Scenes: Garden Retrospective by Ripley LaCross

Please enjoy this Behind-The-Scenes post by Ripley LaCross! They are sharing their creative process of how they made the Pledge Drive exclusive comic "Garden Retrospective".

-Erika

Hello hello, gang! Ripley here to talk PROCESS

(And by “process” I mean I’m going to gush to you about my gardens and share photos n’ sketches, okay? Okay.)

When the ideas for this year’s pledge comic started coming together, I’d only just begun putting my beds together for the season. It was the ONLY thing on my mind. I wouldn’t shut up about my ambitious plans. Over the winter I even drew up a diagram of what I wanted!

I’m just now shifting from Spring crops to Summer, which goes to show how long it was in the making!

PAGE 1

While this is my second growing season on this property, it’s the first time I’m able to start working the beds at the right time. Last year I was down and out recovering from top surgery from February until almost May. The most I was able to do was weakly shove some bulbs into the ground and toss some radish seeds onto unamended soil. Despite all that, I grew an impressive amount of food throughout the Spring, Summer, and into Fall, setting high expectations for the future. So I installed two more metal raised beds, and split the existing wooden bed into two (because I couldn’t reach the center of it!)

I’m really proud of the work I did here, so drawing it was extra special. Also, I got to put my new circular saw to the test. Next year I plan to add a final row of boards to bring this thing to maximum height.

I’m also finding every opportunity I can to draw myself bare chested, showing off my top surgery scars. Most artwork I see depicts clean, symmetrical top surgery scars, with perfect little grafted nipples. Meanwhile, my recovery left me with gnarly necrosis scars and half a grafted nipple. Instead of feeling self conscious about them, I’m going to put them on blast to fight unrealistic beauty standards. I actually LIKE the way they look. They were earned through a painful, difficult recovery. Like battle scars. 

Anyway, this comic was about gardening, right?

PAGE 2
Before any comics could be drawn I needed to do RESEARCH! Introspection! Naval gazing!! How did I feel about all my gardens? Could I even remember all of them? I needed to see all of this written down in one spot, so I spent an evening strolling down memory lane.

[See transcript attached at the end of the post!]

There wasn’t enough room to depict every single one of my little dirt patches in the final comic, I didn’t even reference them all in my research sketches, so I just selected the most impactful ones: My parent’s, the indoor container garden, my first Portland balcony garden and the current one. That’s four out of eight gardens. The others included: A bed I scraped out of the earth at this shack I called home fresh out of my parent’s house, a raised bed behind a friend’s place when I briefly lived in Washington state, my other balcony garden, the front and back stoops of the Four-plex.When I say there’s “years of experience under these fingernails”, I mean it.

Fun fact! This panel is based on a photograph of my brother who’s exactly a year older than me (like a twin, but not a twin?).

(Yes, that’s a mullet. It was the early-90s, they were pretty cool then (and still are, in my opinion!!)

The story behind “I’m helping!” is that my little child brain thought: Raking = good! We raked and hoed the beds at SOME point, and it was an important step, right? So one evening, a few days after my dad had sown some cucumber seeds, I grabbed the garden rake and went to town. It felt good to lend a hand, and my dad was going to be sooo pleased! (He was not, but it wasn’t the end of the world)

The photograph on the left is also based on a photo of my brother (with my dad). I’m a little stinker like that >:)

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If I remember correctly, I ordered a tomato ‘growing kit’ off the Internet because I couldn’t get to the local garden center in my hometown. Public transportation was abysmal (which is why I left some 10+ years ago). But also, I had NO outdoor space available to me. No balcony, no stoop. But what I did have was a HUGE west-facing window. 

So: tomate.

(Featuring: Dot <3 Miss you, girly.)

Didn’t know a damn thing about plant nutrients, root rot, or root spacing. All I knew: Tomato plant =  TOMATOES. I got ONE fruit out of it, shockingly. I have no idea what pollinated it, perhaps a rogue fruit fly??

Thumbnail, layout, pencils, final.

This page was a joy and pain to draw haha. I’m constantly shooting myself in the foot by drawing these rich backgrounds, but that’s unavoidable when the comic is about the backgrounds! This is actually only the second time I’ve used this digital watercolor style so I’m glad it came out as good as it did! It was kind of the result of wanting to save time by skipping the inking stage and jumping straight to color, but... I think I’ve just transitioned to inking with a pencil instead. Do I save time? Probably not. Is it REALLY PRETTY? Absolutely.

Not bad for being completely from memory, yeah?

This balcony was the first time I ever had marginal success in the garden, despite still knowing next to nothing. I was volunteering at a community garden on the other side of the county for my university capstone project, and that got me loads of free plants, but I just wasn’t retaining information. I just kept adding mushroom compost to the pots as if that would help. Something about not wanting to use animal products for fertilizer (I was vegan at the time).

[See transcript attached at the end of the post!]

PAGE 4

I managed to snag a job at a garden center just months before Lockdown. Getting paid to attend gardening workshops, classes, and get hands-on learning from multiple experts was worth the scrapes, sunburns, allergic reactions, and heat exhaustion. You’d be surprised how often garden centers throw away pots and plants just because they’re a little damaged. My coworkers and I would often adopt struggling plants from the compost pile out back, taking them home to nurture them back to life. I’d say I had about a 50% success rate.

It was here that I learned to love roses and all their different shapes and smells. I used to think that all roses smelled like bad candles or funeral homes, but real roses have so much diversity! Some are sweet, others are spicy, some even have no scent at all. Had I not gained this appreciation I don’t think I’d even have any roses in my garden right now (though I’m in the market for another. Lost one to mosaic disease, recently).

My camera roll has a ridiculous amount of rose photos. They’re just so dang pretty.

[See transcript attached at the end of the post!]

Less than a year into working there and I moved into a ground-level four-plex with a front and back door and a landlord that didn’t give two craps about what we did there (if only because he didn’t give a crap). I grew a jungle outside both of my doors, and it was so lovely. It somehow survived the 2021 Heat Dome, multiple backpacking trips with just my husband to care for it in my absence, and a gaggle of teens smashing my pots in the street. 

I wish I had been weighing my harvests back then—I only just picked up the habit from Erika last year—because I have a feeling that I grew more food there than I have at my current place, out of just pots!

Just goes to show you really don’t need raised beds and fields to supplement your diet, containers are just as good!

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Aaaand, back to the present.

So, the soil in the Pacific Northwest is naturally acidic, right? That’s a result of thousands of years of organic material breaking down under our constant rains, which washes away any alkalinity that occurs (The bedrock around here contributes as well, granite has a way of being spicy like that). Purchasing soil ain’t cheap, either. These 8’ x 4’ beds would have required a dozen cubic yards of compost or more to fill, so to save money I purchased half as much as I needed and supplemented with the existing top soil I had hanging around. 

But... I completely neglected to amend it with garden lime: an alkaline mineral that dissolves safely into the soil (you can also use it to turn some varieties of hydrangea pink!). I figured: “There’s enough regular compost added to this, surely that’ll be enough, right?”

WRONG.

That acidity is NUTS. No wonder nothing has been growing!! I guess legumes and radishes are fine in acidic soil, which is why they were fine, but greens and squash? Oh boy, they have been UN-HAPP-Y. 

I’d told myself all winter to do a soil test before the season started, but I procrastinated and figured I’d be fine. Haha ha ha... Hubris will get us all. The nitrogen and phosphorus ain’t looking good either (Nitrogen = green growth on plants. Phosphorus = roots and blooms). This test was only done last week, and since then I’ve added copious amounts of lime, blood, and bone meal. Things are suddenly GROWING. The tomatoes are coming in already! Chill, guys! It’s only June!

So, anyway, the moral of this story? Don’t let unmet expectations get you down, and if you want to grow, sometimes you gotta start at the roots and fix your toxic environment. Is that a moral? Who knows.

Thanks for reading my first behind-the-scenes post!

If you didn’t learn more about me, I hope you learned a little more about gardening. The whole “green thumb” and “black thumb” concept kind of goes over my head, there’s nothing inherent about a person that makes them able or unable to grow plants. It just takes a certain amount of patience and willingness to learn. Besides, dead plants aren’t black, but soil is! So get out there and work the dirt, it’s good for you. 

Thanks again for all your support, I’ll dedicate my next salad to you guys!