Earthly Garden

Mornin’ earthly gardeners! I thought I’d share a photo of my little Mexican lime tree with you. A friend says it’s the same as the “key lime.” Last year it bloomed off and on all spring and summer, and actually made a handful of fruit. What fun! It sits on a semi-shaded porch, and was doing great until we got a lot of ice last winter. I thought it was dead, but it’s not–it’s coming back! I’m always amazed at the rejuvenation power of plants.

It’s been raining profusely here off and on for the past week or so, and the garden is waterlogged. I’m really anxious to get these seedlings out of the office and into the ground. They aren’t quite ready, but I figure IF the sun comes out, they’ll catch up eventually. That’s the hope, anyway.

I hope some of you others are closer to spring. I haven’t heard the weather reports from other parts of the country in a few days, but I expect some of you are still chillin’. Now is the time to pore over those garden seed catalogs (if you still do the paper thang) or sit and browse through all the online garden seed suppliers.

If you haven’t started seedlings yet, there’s still time. My new idea is to set out a few at a time, spaced a few days apart. I don’t really have room for all these seedlings, so some will have to go into containers. Speaking of containers, the tomatoes in the EarthBox are doing fabulously, as are the two remaining tomato plants out in the raised beds.

Next week, I’ll talk about using raised beds in your garden, and tell you how you can build an easy, fast, almost instant garden anywhere! Really! So until then, do a Google for “small raised bed gardens” and get some ideas. And have a good weekend…

Until then, dig it!

bobbi c.
Copyright ©2007 Bobbi A. Chukran. All rights to photos and text reserved.

raised bed gardening, rain, tomatoes, small space gardens, easy gardens

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