Describing the Garden

The following post is an email (letter) I wrote to a friend today describing the garden. I'm including it in this blog, because I like it.

Dear Kathleen:

I’ve taken classes at the county extension for gardening and at Petals from the Past, and we have the most humongous garden I’ve ever attempted this year.

I’ve got 3 tomato areas: the main “eating” tomatoes area has 5 bamboo tepees under which there are 5 plants each and the tepees alternate between big slicing tomatoes and grape tomatoes. Between the tepees are planted purple, red, and green basils, and marigolds line the walking path in front of the tomatoes. To play off the height of the tepees, I planted mixed sunflowers between each tepee along the “wall” of the garden. I’m very excited to see this all filling in as the plants continue to grow. The 2nd tomato area is a bed of only roma tomato plants for sauce. I have 17 roma plants out, 9 in the center of those round metal cages, and 8 beside these weird metal poles the previous owner left. That’s going to be pretty, too. I only planted those from seed this past weekend, and I’m going back to interplant green basil with them today. The third tomato area will be heirlooms, and I’m just doing those for fun. They have great flavor, I’m growing them from seed, and they are SO pretty. I’m (hopefully) putting those out today, and interplanting them with onion and parsley.

Other than tomatoes, I have a bed with decorative Indian corn interplanted with cantaloupes and honeydews, pumpkins, and decorative gourds including birdhouse gourds. I also have wildly successful pumpkin plants growing in the compost heap!

I have a cabbage patch interplanted with chamomile, clary sage, and dill. Impatient as I am, I’ve decided that only chumps wait for cabbage to head! I just snip the leaves and use them in stir fries and this new recipe for this weird (delicious) patty thing.

I have a 50 ft wire fence inside supporting pole beans called gita – yard-long green beans. I’ve grown them the past three years very successfully, and they are so fine and delicious that you only have to just let them hit the sauté pan for a few seconds and they taste fabulous! At each support pole of that fence is a cucumber plant, and at every foot or so is a buttercrunch lettuce, and all this is interplanted with scarlet nasturtiums.

The squash bed contains zucchini, yellow squash, butternut, and acorn squash. It has red clover between the squash hills to keep weeds down and to nitrify the soil supporting the growth of the squash. Petunias line that bed – mixed colors.

A stubborn old stump has been heaped up with dirt and has become the strawberry hill. It looks GREAT!

The bush beans are planted in 3 rows beside the strawberry hill, and I’ve just planted 3 rows of swiss chard (mixed ruby and neon lights) beside those plants. I’m going to put in some more lettuces in that bed, too, including arugula and some thyme.

I went crazy at Petals from the Past buying seed packets for their gorgeous art, and I ended up with 6 varieties of peppers to plant. Got them in the ground this weekend, too, and there are 6 rows with a wide variety of colors, sweet and heat plants, and shapes.

The last two areas are a garlic/onion bed which is doing GREAT and the long row of potatoes against the fence – white and red – both of which were planted back in February. The white potatoes are doing great, but the foliage came in on the trees and is blocking most of the sun over the red potatoes and they look puny.

There is also a row of purple hull cowpeas coming along nicely. I laid drip hoses for every area of the garden and constructed this series of connectors that I basically have to manually hook up the hose to one receiver to water the entire outside area of the garden, and another one to water all the inside beds. That was quite a bit of engineering for my brain, but I managed. Outside the garden we have blueberries and raspberries and fruit trees planted including peaches, pears, plums, apples, and plums. I just saw a pomegranate tree at a friend’s house with those fiery orange blossoms and HAD to get one. The little fruit tree man that comes to the “cattle sale” every Wednesday morning had them, and I got one. I haven’t planted it yet.

Landscaping? I’ve done nothing. The priority this year is the garden and the animals. We haven’t done nearly enough to the inside of the house yet either, but the plan is to make a 4th bedroom in the basement with a full bath. We moved in August, so I didn’t try to get a teaching job this year, and what I don’t understand is this: How did my family ever have clean clothes to wear or a hot meal to eat when I was working outside the home????? It seems like they need me more now that they’re older than they did when they were babies, but I really like that.

I’d love to meet you in Bham or Alabaster for lunch, or you could have a day in the country down here. We could do lunch and visit Petals from the Past in Jemison (just hide your checkbook and debit card!!!). It is a lovely place to spend HOURS and HOURS gawking at beautiful plants and chatting. Let me know what you’d like to do. Hope to see you soon.

Love, Rebecca