Monday, December 29, 2008

A Year of Urban Gardening

In 2007, we moved to the Atlanta-metro area, within the Perimeter (I-285), and we bought a small home built in 1940. With the home came a small sunny front yard and a small shady backyard. We're lifetime gardeners; in our 30 years of marriage, we've lived on as much as 24 acres of land, with plenty of room to grow gardens and trees, and in as little space as a tiny married-student apartment at Texas A&M University, with gardening space on vacant TAMU land. Now we're challenged to grow a garden in this 1940-suburban space. Last summer we began by Tom's chopping out boxwood bushes in the front of the house; we replaced those with a wooden trellis, a bench swing, herbs, tomatoes, peppers, flowers, and, on the side of the house, blueberry bushes. Now we're planning to expand the garden into the yard proper, with a bed along one side of the yard where we will plant flowers and vegetables. This will be an experiment in suburban gardening. Most suburban gardens, if they exist at all, are hidden in back yards. Our backyard is too shady for vegetables (except for one bed for winter produce such as shallots); there we're putting in native perennials that like shade, such as ferns, woodland flowers, trillium, oakleaf hydrangea.

Over this next year, I'll try to remember to post pictures of our experiment. This week we hope to begin preparing a front flower/vegetable bed. But here's some online reading in the meantime:

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