I grew up on a farm, which is sad because I spent so much time trying to get away from that farm that I didn’t bother to learn much about gardening. So now that I’m living in the Suburbs of a medium sized city with an HOA to deal with, I’m having to not only figure out how to navigate the by laws of a city and HOA but learn how to grow in a horrible environment.
Granted I’m on the line of Zones 8b and 9a so the actual environment isn’t that bad as far as the weather is concerned. Yes, we do get HOT in the summers, but we have a long growing season which should allow for a bountiful harvest each year. My problem is actually the limited space coupled with the trash I have for soil to work with.
We are in the neighborhood of one of those national builders that care more about quantity of structures than quality of homes that they are building and one of the deficiencies we have found is that they use as little topsoil to create our lawn as possible. When I dig down to plant anything, I’m into trash, rock, and caliche within six inches of breaking the ground, often more. So, everything I do plant and every bed I attempt to make has to be amended so that there is enough good soil for the plants to be happy.
I do have some raised beds in the backyard, but that is a space that I’m currently sharing with my kids and our dogs, so I don’t have the best parts of the backyard to even place those beds, nor do I have as much space as I would like for a garden that would sustain our family through the year. I am taking more and more of the back each year, but even then, I have to balance play space with the space we have our garden in to be fair to our kids.
So that pushes some of the garden to the front yard. If I wasn’t in a city, I wouldn’t care what it looked like and my front lawn would be a series of raised beds with enough space between them to walk and work, solving the soil problem completely. But I’m in a city and dealing with and HOA that wants uniformity and a certain look through the neighborhood which means anything I do plant needs to “look” the part.
And that puts me back to working with what I have as everything I am planting in the front will be in ground, working within the soil I have. One plus is, as long as I have a tree and a “flower bed”, I’m with in standards of the HOA. They don’t have a definition of the size and shape of that bed, so I’m expanding the flower bed and making its shape more organic this year to allow me more space to plant out vegetables and flowers, hopefully making what we do grow look as beautiful as the professionally installed flower beds next door. I’m also creating new beds; this year one will be encircling the tree and in the coming years I plan to add a few more along the fence line and possibly near the sidewalk with the goal of having 60% of the lawn converted to garden by the end of the decade.
Now that will mean more maintenance than my average neighbor as I’ll want to make sure my plants are looking well and producing enough food to share. I figure if it looks good and my neighbors are enjoying the fruits and vegetables of my garden, they will be less likely to care that it isn’t traditional. In fact, I hope it inspires my neighbors to start building out their own gardens in times so that more of us can start sharing locally grown produce and help each other not only cut our grocery costs but also be healthier in the long run.
It’s a challenge that will take years of education both for myself and my neighbors to accomplish, but I feel like in the economy we currently live in, it’s a necessary one. As the season opens up, I’ll share in a journal form how things are going and hopefully you too will decide to join me in getting back to some basics we thought were just too boring as kids but now realize are more than necessary for our world, our families to survive.
J.Rhett Lively 