I finally have a garden again!

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One of the reasons for buying acerage was to have room for a bigger garden and more fruit trees and berries than we had in our home back in Saratoga years ago. The place in Saratoga was a fixer upper and it required some hard work to get things going there. However, in moving from a surburban quarter acre to almost five acres in a more rural area the scale of things makes the difficulty of some projects a lot bigger than just the relative sizes. Our yard in Saratoga had a fence, and although there was an ongoing problem with gophers the “pests” were managable. Here, the area is open, gophers set up an extensive freeway system below the surface, and deer, jack rabbits and cottontails are regular visitors. There are some weeds which are so nasty they would be a marvel of bio-engineering had they come out of the laboratories instead of mother nature. o the process to get things to the garden I have pictured in my head has simply been out of reach… and twenty years have gone by.

This past year I started sketching out the garden plans again.   As I worked over the ideas, I found that some of the old assumptions needed to be changed. And as I started making those changes, they seemed to propagate other changes. But it was clear that the grand scheme was going to not going to happen this year — and probably not next year either.

  So I looked for options that might work while the bigger pieces were still to be done. The result — very simple — four raised beds that could be set up near the house with a minimal amount of fencing. While the initial concept was that these were to be “temporary” beds, as that part got going, the temporary part has vanished and another series of changes — improvements to the overall plan have happened as a result of the experience so far.

The drip system for watering was completed over the Memorial Day weekend. Seedlings and seeds planted the week before are beginning to make the beds look more like a garden. I am looking forward to discovering what will grow here and am hoping for fresh corn and green beans and vine ripened tomatoes to serve at mealtime again.