gardening

The Personal Page of: Topper (Linda)

I Love Gardening...

Growing up I helped my mom a lot in the garden....

Although, as a kid, that consisted mostly of weeding!

Amazing that I still ended up liking gardening!

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I won't be spending as much time in IM as I have been so, please, feel free to contact me by email ....

I was in my thirties when I read of a method of gardening that had
been around for years.

I started seeking more information on what was refered to as
deep bed gardening,
and in the process learned about
square foot gardening.

With the combination of these two methods, combined with my
own imagination, I came up with a way of gardening that I
thought to be just about perfect...

Maximum production of food and flower with a minimum of space,
time, resources and maintenance.

It allowed me to have a pretty unique setup in the small yard of a mobile home
that I owned a few years ago. I look forward to implementing these techniques
when I have some land to work on. One of my many goals for the future.

I worked out several methods of minimizing labor... Using various techniques for
automated and unattended watering I increased production of both food
and flower allowing more time to enjoy the gardens instead of working on them.

One of the advantages to both the deep bed and square foot methods of gardening is
that the desired plants can be placed close enough together so that with the addition of
mulch and/or compost most weeds don't stand a chance and are easily spotted if they
do come up, making it a simple matter to pull them. As a general rule I spent
less than 20 minutes a week actually 'weeding'.

What I did was wander the yard each morning, enjoying the view, picking a strawberry
here and there (I had alpines planted in little clusters through out the flower beds
to give me a treat as I wandered around) and if I spotted a weed I'd simply pluck it out.

I chose to section out the yard so that I had one area that was done each day.
That meant that I only needed to spend 15 or 20 minutes watering.
Again, a simple task that was accomplished while wandering around the yard.
Enjoying the view and picking the strawberries...

Using a rain guage to monitor weekly rainfall, supplemental watering to each area
was simply a matter of adding to the weeks' rainfall to total the full inch of water required
a week. I used an empty cat food can as my watering gauge. Just about the perfect depth,
all I had to do was drop it on the ground and watch the level. Nothing fancy at all.

While my neightbors valiently sprinked their flower beds daily in an effort to keep
everything alive....
My beds and containers flourished while I got to sit back and enjoy the view.

Definately my way of gardening!!!