First "Garden" in South Carolina

When we were at my sister's home in North Carolina we saw her wonderful herb garden.  Immediately I wanted to have one.  Despite the fact that I almost always use dried herbs...!

It  is probably a good idea to build a garden like my sister's but now that I see what we have for soil, I can see it will be several years of soil amendments before we can grow anything.  I think the Friday farmers' markets will be our friend for a while.

Then earlier this week I saw some very nice basil and some rosemary plants at Lowe's garden center.  We had a plastic bin whose lid bit the dust in the trip south that I thought we could turn that into a container garden for our deck.

Dear One was kind enough to drill holes in the bottom and around the sides of that container which was in the recycling pile.  We purchased a bag of small rocks and some supposedly "garden soil" along with those two pots of plants.

This is what we have on our deck now:

This makes me happy!  Even though I planted the plants sort of wonky.  Last night there was a nice rain storm so their very first night they got a nice gentle drink.  We have already had basil in salad and sandwiches.  Well, at least I have.  Dear One is a little leery...but I am certain he will come around.

Gardening on a Mission!

We always had a garden at home.  When we found out where we were going to be living on our mission I was thrilled to see there was a balcony off our living room. Immediately I thought we would be able to raise lettuce and maybe a few herbs.  When we arrived we discovered that our balcony faces east so there would only be sun for a couple of hours in the morning.  That would not work for a garden.  Disappointing.

What to do, what to do?  Well,  a month or so ago I put us on a list of farms and gardens which sell to the public and/or have pick your own.  We get lots of notices, most of which are further away than we want to drive.  This week we received word that there were pick your own tomatoes!  Yay!!!  And I really mean YAY!!!  I love real tomatoes.  The tomatoes we buy in the store are totally tasteless and not at all juicy.  So I talked Dear One into a gardening trip.  The J's went with us, too.  So nice.

This is what we picked:

Dear One picked the berries.  Some of the tomatoes are Brandywine, which are very very flavorful.  The others (in the foreground) also taste wonderful.  I may be on tomato overload for a few days but since it only happens a few weeks a year, I don't mind the skin rash and tummy issues..  At least, not much...

Elder and Sister J gave us the Gravenstein apples, a new variety to me.  The corn is yellow and white, which is what we prefer.  My father always raised Butter and Sugar corn back in the old days when I was in my youth.  I personally picked hundreds of bushels of that wonderful corn to sell at the roadside stand, to sell at Tunbridge World's Fair (which is a September tradition), and for my father to peddle to the stores in our local area. 

Seeing that corn always brings back happy memories.  One of those memories being that our corn piece is where I met Dear One for the first time, when he came over to help my father with the corn picking.  True story.  May I say that he must have seen something there because as far as physical appearance, well at 5 o'clock in the morning, after walking through the wet cornfield, with pollen from the tassels, and "rain" from the cornstalks making all of us soaking wet, we were a sight to behold.  It was much more fun to pick corn at mid-day, but that was not the time we did it.  By 7 o'clock my father would have finished the milking chores and came down to pick us corn pickers up  to bring us back up on the hill for breakfast.  Often Mother would have made us hot chocolate.  Hot chocolate is a comfort food for me.  Thus renewed, we would go back for another few hours of picking.  Lots of bushels every day.

Gardening: New old Method--Ruth Stout No-Work Gardening

The hay bale gardening did not turn out to my expectations this year.  The weak link here was the gardener.  As usual.  Anyway,  recently I was talking with my sister.  She is converting their huge vegetable garden in North Carolina to the Ruth Stout method which we learned about years ago.  I thought: why not try it here in Vermont? After all, Ruth Stout lived in Connecticut.  We have ten bales that are pretty much on their way to being compost from this year's garden failure.  They should be great.

Right end of front garden after installing rotted hay.

So, today I went out to the two small gardens and yanked up most of the leftover tomato, basil, lettuce, etc plants.  I laid them right back down where they had been.  I had most of the tomato plants pulled up and positioned horizontally on the ground then stepped over towards the rhubarb to yank off the dead leaves.  Stepped in a hole with my left foot then dropped like a stone and rolled completely over.  I wish there had been a video taken of it.  It was a beautiful thing.  At least today, or right now, it seems like it was a beautiful thing.  This happened about an hour ago and I still feel okay.  Afterwards I got up and kept working for a while longer. I am hoping that later this evening or tomorrow  I do not feel any ill effects.  That would really put me off the work...and I want this garden to succeed next year.

I used several of the ten bales from this year's hay bale garden which did not work as well as I had hoped.  After that I brought some of the rotted hay from the grow-box garden (where the lovely doe deer ate all the yellow string beans just when they were getting good looking...I told you about that...) and spread it over the front garden. 

Rhubarb end of the front garden.

So far I have not gotten the side garden completely covered.  I think I will look for some new "bad" hay that animals won't eat to finish it off.  Maybe even use some of the wood chips we got last year when we were going to do the Back to Eden gardening method....

There are lots of articles about Ruth Stout and her gardening method on the internet.  Plus a couple of YouTube videos with her showing someone around her garden.  (There are Magyar subtitles but the videos are in English.)