Gardening Day
One of the never ending supply of people looking for lawns to mow stopped by our house yesterday evening and knocked on our door, reminding us that we once again had a front yard of weeds grass that needed attention from a lawnmower. We paid them the $15 for the cut and got things spiffed up, but today our neighbor from across the street hollered over to us that our yard now looked like everyone else's in the neighborhood. He sounded disappointed and we realized he was right. For the first time in years, our front yard did look just like every other yard on the street. Now that just won't do. We've always been the odd-balls in the neighborhood with our monthly music jam parties and the front yard with no grass. The jam parties stopped long ago and the grass returned and while the inside of our house has been remodeled in a most unusual style, the front yard is about as bland and boring as they come. I've been working, ever so slowly, on returning the north side of the front yard to flowers rather than weeds grass, but I need to pick up the pace. And now there's the issue of the south side of the yard which before was occupied by two trees and the never ending supply of seedlings which made it look more like some sort of dwarf forest between mowings instead of a lawn. The trees are gone and now that I have full sun in this area my plans were to turn this side of the yard into a vegetable garden. Unfortunately, the amount of work and money required to amend the soil to grow vegetables was way beyond my budget and energy levels. I considered raised beds and I had a couple of frames already that I could use but again, there's the expense of gardening soil to fill up the frames and there was no way I could afford that right now. However, I came up with a plan that will let me make a start. I'm going to use the raised bed frames to define an area that I will use for container gardening. I will buy pots and soil as I can afford it and eventually I will have enough pots of good soil where I can just dump all them into the raised bed area some winter to fill it up for the next spring. Today I started out on this plan by planting a tomato plant and a summer squash plant in a couple of 20" containers. I'm hoping I can get the squash plant to grow up a PVC pipe I put in the middle of the pot. It might not work, but I figured it was worth a shot. Rob's got his own plans for staking the tomato plant, something about a trick he learned from a coworker that grew up as a migrant farm worker. I've got some seeds for some green bean plants that I plan to put in some smaller pots that I have around here somewhere, but I'm going to have to get some more garden soil first. Now I don't really care if we end up with tomatoes or squash, but I'm really hoping for some fresh green beans. It's the only way I like green beans. Fresh green beans rock. Otherwise, I hate them. Some vegetables such as corn or carrots are much better when freshly picked, but I can still tolerate them if they are few days or weeks out of the field. Green beans don't fall in that category and I'm wondering now if maybe peas are they same way. I hate peas. I think they taste like dirt, but I've never had fresh peas. Maybe I would like them. Maybe I'll grow some just to find out.