My Garden

This is the third year we're starting a garden. The first year was.. chaos. I got too many things, my husband didn't want to go near that orb spider no matter how safe it was (she LOOKED scary), and I started to work on my fear of bugs. I am a city girl, or at least a suburban girl, and I never had a garden growing up. I remember being in awe of my friend Holland's backyard and the year her parents let us help harvest at their house. I was 7 years old. It wasn't until my daughter was 3 that I really saw what the plants looked like that grew the food I ate. It felt like I was a stranger in a strange land, taking my 3 year old to Great Country Farms for u-pick and having to follow everyone else's lead on where we were going and where to find the food. I have truly enjoyed the experience! Last year's garden.. I'm not sure what happened. My husband kept forgetting it was there (we live on the middle floor) and he had been named Harvester of the Garden since I had done all the work planting it. We hardly got anything out of it. There was a lot of work, a LOT of weeds, and then I found baby rabbits in one of the squares of my raised bed. I think part of the problem was that they were back against a fence which didn't allow me to harvest from both sides. I thought I had solved that problem from SFG by making them 8'x2' beds instead of 4'x4'. It also just did not *look* attractive. I understand the things Mel Bartholemew mentions in his book are great for function but I needed something pretty, I guess? This year I am moving the beds. We have a small backyard (ahh, townhouse living), and the front of my house faces east and the rear faces west though there is a row of townhomes in that direction. We still get a fair bit of sunlight - around 7 to 8 hours in the backyard. There's no shade back there either save for our small deck. Thus far I have emptied the beds, moved them, and started amending the tough clay soil around the perimeter of my yard. I have purchased 2/3's of Mel's Mix (I didn't have enough room in my car for the vermiculite) and it is in my garage waiting to go. I purchased enough to finish amending the perimeter along the fence. I also purchased some sedum to plant around my a/c unit. Around the fence will be my daughter's flowers - zinnias, sunflowers, and some other random seeds I've collected the last few years. I'm a little late in the game, but we'll be starting our seeds over the next couple of days. I am hoping to get out there after nap time today to mix up the dirt and plant the sedum and get the peas planted in the hopes that we might see a harvest from them. It might be too late, but it's worth a shot.