Hey Steemians! I am going back in my photo archives to share with you my first garden in Southern California - a good excuse for a trip down memory lane for me :)
Since I am in between gardens at the moment its rewarding to remember the joy I received from this little garden.
My garden was less than 300 square feet. Barely a postage stamp. Wow!
I was living in a small condo and lucky enough it had a sprinkle of dirt out back. This photo is a preview of how my garden evolved into a fairly productive food garden, but then I'll show you where I started.
But as a new gardener that < 300 sq ft was huge for me
because I was brand new to gardening and it gave me enough space to do a lot of experimenting.
When I first moved in at the end of summer, the garden was more like a wild weed nursery with weeds growing taller than me; dried, prickly, bulky, dusty, deeply rooted. I proceeded to pull them all out and got the soil quite bare.
Here is a snapshot of the original sketch that we made to give you some context.
I planted grass because every garden should have some turf right?
I first used sod, but when that died back pretty good from the summer heat I learned I could direct seed grass and that sprouted and filled in exceptionally well.
I wasn't really into straight lines so my succulent beds became circular and wavy.
Then went in all the succulents, cactii and one pepper plant
that we had been carrying from apartment to apartment balcony.
I reserved the other side of the garden for seeding a few veggies
I got my hands on a packet of beans, carrots and tomatoes from the local hardware store, plunked them in the ground and eagerly watched and watered every day.
And then I created a raised mound for all the cacii
which @idyllwild aptly called the "burial mound" because it looked like a freshly dug grave for a small animal.
I had recently acquired some roses
from @idyllwild's father who had them in pots and didn't have room to plant them. They were suffering badly from disease and poor nutrition. I pruned them back hard and plunked them in the ground. Despite the fact that the roses had trouble getting nutrition from the soil, we enjoyed many beautiful blooms from these second hand roses :)
The rocks you see were collected from various hikes and adventures.
I made a tradition of carrying cool looking rocks back home from where ever I went. On a particular 10 mile backpacking trip my friends looked at me funny when I grabbed a 12 lb boulder and put it in my backpack as we started our return 10 mile hike. I guess I've always been a little crazy about physical work and sentimental about my garden.
I started learning that there are some plants that are more drought tolerant than others and plunked down some lavenders and creeping rosemary between the roses.
At the time I didn't really know it was important to cover the soil, but I wanted to fill in every space with different plants so that I could get more variety and fun out of my garden!
Well at this point in my garden I had already learned quite a lot
Mostly through my own experimentation and trusting nature to do it's thing. I had quite a bit of failures as well. I also hadn't yet read one book on gardening, I didn't know squat about soil health, but I was starting to talk to friends, family and get some basic literature to learn more about my new found hobby.
Some of the plants in my garden were suffering because the soil quality was very poor, although the cactii, succulents and Plumeria did exceptionally well as they are known to do in hot climates with poor soil.
I also quickly became less satisfied with the direction my garden was heading and decided it needed some redesigning.
Follow me and stay tuned for the next post on my first garden
where I will share what I learned and the direction my garden headed. (and then later on I'll do more posts on my 2nd garden!)
And in the meantime enjoy some more photos of natural beauty!
Learn more about me in my welcome post
