Great, just what the world needs, another blog. Well maybe not, but at a minimum this will help me to be a bit more disciplined about one of our great passions - gardening. My wife Cher is the real visionary here. She has been as passionate about growing things as a Hobbit and has largely dragged me along the path with her.
We started this journey with our first garden thirty-four years ago. It was a tiny postage stamp yard behind a town house that looked like all the other town houses. Still, the woman wanted a garden and I provided the grunt work to help her realize her vision. She wanted raised beds so we constructed three of them, all but eliminating any grass that was there. Then she said we must employ the "French double-digging method" so we would build good soil. I was all for it until I learned that that meant digging all the soil out one foot deep, then digging another foot to break up the compaction. Adding compost and wood chips helped to improve the soil quality and we were on our way.
I still am amazed that neither of us broke an ancle or worse falling as the beds were less than six inches apart. We never did, and she set about growing vegetables and companion flowers. She certainly did her homework, reading extensively and poring over seed catalogs during the winter months. She became a huge fan of Mel Bartholomew's "Square Foot Gardener" and designed the beds with a grid approach to maximize our yields.
I stayed on the outskirts and recall observing things growing from timt to time, but was mostly just glad that I had a lot less grass to cut. Things were pretty normal until we returned from a two week summer vacation, I think late July - early August. Leaving, we made arrangements with my Aunt to water as needed and care for the cat. When we got back the garden had literally exploded. All the houses had the same privet hedge-row; now ours sported clusters of cherry tomatoes throughout. The bigger tomato plants were also huge and everything else also took off to an amazing degree. The weather turned hot while we were gone, my Aunt diligently carried out her watering chores and the garden did what my wife thought it would, but even she was amazed at the sight of it all. Being absent literally made us see the fruits of our early season labor. If the hook wasn't sent then, it certainly was now.
From those beginnings we now find ourselves in a home that has a lot more room to grow things. Besides flowers and vegetables we have added a pond, bonsai, rain gardens and an appreciation of native plants. We have never been fans of chemicals and have always sought out the most organic, benign way to deal with garden pests and problems. Along the way, we have gotten reputations from friends for having green thumbs. Maybe we do, but I really think it is more work and follow through that makes things grow. And like they say, it isn't work if you love what your doing. So this blog will be our forum for collecting our stories and lessons learned, and hopefully, share them with an audience that is like minded in their pursuit of enjoying a garden.
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| Cher in her garden. |
