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Photo Credit: Southern Foodways Alliance |
Gardening for Beginners
Been thinking about starting a garden this year. A very small, “easy” one to start with. It’s not that I’m a gardening novice as we had a HUGE garden when I was a kid and was forced to collect row upon row of string beans, peas, and tomatoes *shudder* among other veggies & fruit. But I didn’t exactly help out with the planning and logistics of the garden when I was 14. And it’s been a long time since then anyway. So I’m just barely a step above novice.
Also, I have this big problem in that I’m horrible at keeping things alive. My lucky bamboo even died and all you have to do with those things is keep water on it (which I did; it still died). Fish are lucky to last a few months in this house. I’ve found the secret to those is minimal fussing. Feed them a few times a week if you remember, turn their light on occasionally, don’t bother with a heater, and never change or test their water. Be sure to let so much algae grow that you can’t even enjoy them because you can’t see them through the sludge.
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Poor fishies! |
Assuming I can some how get my hands on some magic beans, the next issue is one of time management. I work full time. Or rather, I have a full-time job that I go to every day. And the husband works second shift, so that leaves me a single mom to a very curious and active 2 year old dare devil of a boy most nights. I plan to do my garden maintenance on the weekends during nap time and in the evenings after little dude goes to bed but before the sun sets if I need to. You know, the hours that I’d be normally sitting on my tush in front of the TV surfing the interwebs. I think it’s feasible if I keep the garden size under control.
We definitely have the space for a garden though. 1.2 acres split by a little natural water spring/creek thing. The back 1/3 of the property is not maintained (for laziness reasons), and I have amazing plans stored up in this brain of mine for the coolest Japanese-inspired garden some day when I win the lotto. Or someone gifts me $100,000 since you really need to play the lotto to win.
I think for my convenience I’ll put the garden behind the house though. Probably directly behind the house because I will have to completely enclose the entire thing. Which brings us to the next issue. Yes, I live in the burbs and the front of our house is actually on a double-laned major road. But the back of the house faces nothing but woods for miles. It’s the best of both worlds really; 5 minutes from a mall in the front, but all the peace of country living in the back. My house is basically a mullet. Now when I say country, I don’t mean pseudo-country. It’s Jack Hanna’s Animal Adventures back there most of the time.
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We may not have deer and antelope at play, but we have deer and turkeys. And coyotes. |
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See that tall pine in the way back to the left of the photo? Our property goes about 20′ past that. |
Try a square foot garden maybe? I hope to do one next year. But, everything is done on top of the ground…so you actually put a plastic covering over the grass area and fill in your box with soil for growing. If you google it you’ll get a ton of info. And that way you avoid any chemicals that are in the “natural” soil.