Since a change in job to one less focused on advocacy, I have not found things to blog about in my professional blog and so have been itching to blog about something. So when my sister-in-law, Brenda, mentioned blogging about my garden (so she could track what I am doing), it seemed like the perfect thing to do. Thank you, Brenda, for the great idea.
A little about my background so people understand I am not an expert gardener or anything near that. I am fairly new to serious gardening. It all started many years ago when a former colleague gave me a scheflerra plant. Up until that point I had always killed any living plant. That plant has not only survive but is now thriving. That same year, a parent of a student, gave me and that same colleague a mini rose bush. Hers has since died. Mine has survived rabbits eating it down to nothing twice, aphids, and many other obstacles and now looks beautiful.
Since then each year, I had at least a pot or two of tomatoes and other plants on the patio of the various apartments and condos where we lived. In 2010 we purchased our first house with a yard. That yard was planted with many perennial gardens and I couldn't wait to have my first real garden. Ever since then I have tried new things each year. This will be my 4th year with a "real" garden. My yard has significant challenges because of the amount of trees. Most plants that require full sun don't get enough sun to do very well. Except for in the raised beds, the soil is hard as a rock and full of clay. Additionally, less than a foot down you find more rocks than soil. So everything I've done has been an attempt to either compensate for these challenges or in some cases ignore these challenges in hopes that the plant will thrive anyway.
Last year I had the option of starting a garden at my work (at the time I worked at a shelter for victims of domestic violence) which did surprisingly well with our limited resources. It was also a huge stress reliever as anytime the stress of the job got to be too much, I could escape to the garden to do some weeding. Never would I have imagined how much stress could be relieved through weeding!
This year I'm going to be working with my dad in his yard which gets much more sun. He has been talking about putting in raised beds for years and moving his garden to a better location and I was looking for more success growing tomatoes which need so much sun so he jumped at the opportunity for help moving his gardening and setting up raised beds. He also designed it to the beds to be covered which will give us an early start.
Another change this year is we recently had 25 trees removed from our yard (which was maybe 1/3 of the trees in our yard). One was a huge very dead silver maple we feared would one day fall on the garage so we knew it needed to be removed. We also knew we had some other dead ones. When we had a tree guy come out he explained to us that Dutch Elm's disease had hit many of our elms and so they had to go. I was sad to see the trees go as the woodpeckers love them but will welcome the additional sun for my garden.
So I'm really looking forward to a new planting season and have already started preparing. Now if only we can hope for more rain this year. The drought was a huge struggle last year with my rain barrels empty more often than full.
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