A 7-acre, small space garden?
Mornin’ earthly gardeners!
Some person yesterday commented to me that anybody could be a good gardener if they had seven acres to play on. LOL. Well, that’s not the case here. Yes, we have seven acres, but it’s almost solid rock and rubble covered by scrub and thousands of junipers. I got around that by enclosing a small area in the front of my house where the garage and house make an “L” shape and fencing it in. We have horrible deer problems out here, and lots of resident wild critters, so we had to make the fence at least 7-feet high.
As for the garden itself, raised beds to the rescue! I built a series of small raised beds, some perimeter beds and two larger ones. The small ones are built from untreated 2×12″ cedar boards that have lasted for over ten years so far. The larger beds are simple, inexpensive concrete blocks laid on the ground in a rectangle. The perimeter beds are simply rocks that I gathered from the property and stacked around the edge of the fence. I filled all the planting areas with a mixture of top soil, compost that I either made or purchased, a few loads of good garden dirt from Gardenville in Austin, and whatever else I could scrape up to include. We have almost no topsoil here, either. Did I mention that?
I thought you might enjoy this photo of one end of the garden, the one closest to my office. To the left, you can see one of the rock beds, at the far back you can see the deer fence where I’m growing a grapevine. To the right you can see a few of the raised cedar beds.
That whole area is around the size of a small suburban backyard, and most of the veggies I grow fit in that space. So you see, you don’t need lots and lots of acreage to have a garden. I actually prefer gardening in small spaces. It gives me a sense of an enclosure, a garden wall, secluded and safe. AND it’s more manageable. So far, the fence has kept the deer out. The squirrels are another matter!
Spring IS coming, I promise!
dig it!
bobbi c.
Copyright ©2007 by Bobbi A. Chukran
small space gardens, garden enclosures, raised bed gardening, garden fences, deer problems in garden
March 16th, 2007 at 10:23 am
When my house was built in rocky New England, all the topsoil (such as there was) was scraped off. Don’t ask me why. We’ve spent years enriching the soil one bit at a time with our own compost rather than truck in loads of new soil. We’ve got almost two acres, but acreage doesn’t matter nearly as much as soil quality.
March 19th, 2007 at 9:50 am
Exactly! I’ve grown more in my small garden with added compost than some people grow on several acres. We didn’t have topsoil here, but most of the sub-divisions in surrounding areas are scraped, then other soil is trucked in before the landscaping is done. That just doesn’t make sense.
Glad to hear that you’re making your own compost!
bobbi c.