The 80-year-old trees in the backyard have grown so large that garden space is at a premium - and tomatoes always take precedence over every other edible now that one of the goals of the AppalSeeds program is self-sustainability.
But we love beans, greens, peppers, potatoes, turnips, beets, and a whole host of other vegetables in addition to the glorious Lycopersicon esculentum. We had experimented with straw-bale raised beds last year in order to expand garden space. We built these as close to the water spigot as possible, since the 2012 drought made hand-carrying water a venomously hateful chore.
Still, these three beds didn't allow enough unshaded space for those succulent sprawlers like greasy beans, summer squash, sweet potatoes and cucumbers -
So this year we plowed up the front yard.
 |
| From the porch facing the driveway. The beds are about 22 feet out from the base of the porch. |
I stayed home while the plowing was going on. You know, it really doesn't take a man with a small tractor and five linear feet of steel tine to till under a healthy, lush 80-year-old lawn.
I went on to work after the scalping of the turf and said to Mr., "Now, when you go home for lunch, bear in mind that there's a lot of bare soil out there."
Mr. came back from lunch with some very wide Oh-Grandma-What-Big-Eyes-You-Have and said, "Well, that's a lot of dirt. A lot of dirt. Gonna be a lot of work. Wow. All that dirt." And that is all he said, bless his heart.
It takes faith and love and a serious big batch of charity to let your spouse (who has a record of starting big messy projects one year and not getting back around to them for oh, say, six or twelve years) plow up your entire front yard in a single morning because she has a dozen varieties of weird bean seeds and a great longing to create a vast prairie of bizarre heirloom tomatoes.
 |
| The Front Farm follows the lines of the porch, creating a 22 x 60 foot garden space. |
No comments:
Post a Comment