Lil's Garden

  The Wendell Berry poem, "The Man Born to Farming," says  "He has seen the light lie down in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn."  I'm not sure I was actually born to farming or gardening, but every year about this time I forget about the unbearable heat and the worry about rain and the Bermuda grass and the sore knees and I am reborn to gardening.  This year we were especially blessed when a new friend of ours who is a Brahma cattle farmer mucked out her barn. She had 30 years of wonderful compost to share. We got three loads of the black gold and spread it on our newly prepared beds. We are ready to start seedlings, plant seeds, onion sets, and seed potatoes, and see them rise up again. Judy Collins has a great line in her song, "Fallow Way": "The black earth dreams of violets." I hope on this cold and drizzly day that our manure enriched garden soil is dreaming of tomatoes and peppers and potatoes and onions and beans and sunflower...

 It's been a while since I've written anything on Lil's Garden. Both gardens were not very successful in 2022. Between the late frost and the early 100 degree weather, gardening did not get off to a good start. The drought and the heat of the summer made it almost impossible to grow anything, even with the irrigation system. I have a lot to learn. I did learn that zinnias, basil, peppers, and eggplants are the most tolerant of extreme heat. We even harvested a watermelon for Thanksgiving this year. The recent freeze has taken everything except a lavender bush and some oregano.    I'm attempting to refresh the herb garden. We got an attachment for our BCS Walk-Behind Tractor that chips wood. So we made some lovely mulch for the paths. All the landscape timbers are rotting. So the next step was to replace them. We are also finding it difficult to recycle glass in our area. So... since glass doesn't decompose anyway, we decided to recycle our glass bottles as edging. T...