I recently wrote on my list of "13 Things To Do While Living" about leaving for posterity a series of Gardens.
Here's where I've been proactive in that venture to date:
What was it-- must have been two summers ago... nope. Last year, really?
Started at my brother's house in Round Rock, Tx. We'd ordered a plethora of seeds from Heritage Farms/Seed Savers Exchange. Only success I ever had with tomatoes from seed-- we took a waterbed heating element/pad and used it to bottom-heat the dehydrated peat pellet seed starter kits you can get at any nursery...
That year it was potatoes from compost; came up all on their own, in their own corner of the garden, so... we let them ! ha!
We (Brother, Nephew and I) had spent many a cool night in B's back yard, throwing darts and burning scrap wood and cut timber, incorporating the ash into an already-existing garden bed ~4.5' x 12'. The bed was one year used, and one dormant, but the dormant year saw a lot of the afore-mentioned "scrap wood" cover the bedding area, thus keeping active the bug/moisture retention biodiversity... and the soil nice and malleable come my planting turn...
I started the seeds, planted the seedlings... got a job as a landscaper in Austin...
Moved away...
Granted, not far away, but the 15-minute cruise north to see B and N and the Garden became a 45-minute hell from the 40-workweek traffic Hegira.
We had an auto-water sprinkler set up for the area, for the garden. And I did make it several times-- usually twice, oft more, never less than once a week-- over the next couple of months to the Double R to check progress, weed, compost-turn... You know... GARDEN.
The brother told me later that summer/fall that there was tremendous success in growing vegetative growth in the garden.
The fruiting? Not so much... [A recurring problem in this Houston garden-- but I give myself away...]
And speaking of that Landscape job...
The second garden came there, at the employer's yard.
There was an office building complete with restroom and small kitchenette (well, once you provided the fridge and Coleman stove... and a dish or two. Somebody got food, right?!?) and several other rooms. One of these I would make "home" for several weeks during a moving transition from RR to Austin. And the beauty of this was...
Right outside the window of the floor-mounted box spring I slumbered on, separated from me by only a crushed-granite path not three feet wide, was my [ **quickly intakes breath**] ("other") Garden...
The Company had seen fit to grant me space to plant some of the seedling tomatoes I had in pots from the spring seeding. They allowed me an area ~9' x 9'.
Eggplant, tomatoes, squash, peppers hot and sweet, watermelons...
It was the height of summer. I had an outdoor job I loved. I had an outdoor shower tucked behind a grapevine that was a slice of Heaven removed and placed Mid-Town for me.
I had nights alone to wander the yard, to ground in the Garden...
I could sleep until three minutes before worktime because... I was
AT work! ha! But I was usually up early, taking a morning rinse outside, turning on the water for the veggies, watering the 'commercial' plants..
Not sure how that garden ever turned out; a difference of opinion drove me from the landscape company-- and the yard my garden was nestled in-- and fates found me that hurricane season riding out Ike in the Beaumont area. [Fun, that. Still have MRE's and a tarp from that month...]
And this year... well, here I am in the nation's fourth largest city, ekeing out some heat-skin-cracked tomatoes and an occasional okra pod or three, and with the cantaloupe being the compost fruit du saison...
And you know... I really hope to be able to report next fall, from the hills of the Ozarks, that my Orchard Project and Berrypatch sidekick are the newest additions in this hopefully annually-recurring and growing-- pun is there, intended or not-- Legacy...
Slainte, folks...
Cygnus
