Introduction, 2007-2008

Almost two years ago exactly, my wife (who was then my fiancée) and I moved into this, our first house: a cookie-cutter Ranch built in 1950 that looks nearly identical to the five houses that sit alongside it. Very basic in many ways; very poorly designed in so many others.

One of the cornerstones of the Post-War housing boom--I'm sure of it--was the sterile, manicured lawnscape. Previous tenants had put some effort into sprucing up the landscaping: a few boxwoods here; a cluster of tulips, daffodils, or Stella D'Oro daylilies there. Hostas and grape hyacinths were used to fill in a lot of gaps. A few bleeding hearts, two lilac bushes, and a couple clumps of irises were really exciting in the Spring following our arrival. My favorite things however were planted in a raised garden bed along the garage: a hearty lavendar bush and a happy crop of strawberry plants! It would be the start of our backyard farm. Almost everything was limited to beds that hugged the house's exterior walls and extended no more than 4 feet deep.

My driving force for owning a house with a sunny yard was the ability to grow vegetables and a native plant garden and this was the perfect blank canvas. The back of our house faces the south and the yard slopes down as much as 10-degrees in the same direction (i.e. good drainage). Fighting back my disdain for lawns and mowing, I reluctantly bought a crusty old lawn mower that I found on Craigslist for $20 and mowed the lawn no more than three times during the rest of 2007. (The mower still lives today.)

Skip ahead to 2008, my wife, C, helped me start removing lawn from the backyard. I had no clue how to start or where to go with my plan, but knew that I wanted a garden and didn't want lawn. I think we barely exposed 100 square feet of garden space--but it was perfect. We raised three monster zucchini plants, five or six tomato plants of two varieties, a lettuce mix, spinach, peppers, and a potpouri of herbs--all from seed.

Without going into too much detail and writing a book about them, I learned a lot from the mistakes of that year. The most important lesson was to plant less of more, different things and not all at once. Over-ripe zucchini invited terrible bugs to infest the garden; cilantro was burnt out long before the end of summer; and we're still fighting the invasion of tomato seedlings--the result of a million rotting cherry tomatoes that weren't harvested quickly enough.

I chalked the mistakes up to "experience" and was excited to plan our 2009 garden. This year C and I got a lot more ambitious. I can tell you this years mistakes I've noted so far, but it'll have to wait.