When we first arrived at this property, I had big plans for it. After growing vegetables in the cramped side yard of our house in Florida, I was determined to have an expansive vegetable garden here in Georgia. As for an ornamental garden, I'm not sure the singular form is appropriate here. I wanted ornamental gardens—magnificent spaces wrapping around the entire house and extending beyond the pond.
I wanted something like I had seen at any one of the countless grand gardens I've visited in England—you know, the ones that require a team of gardeners to keep them looking magnificent. As you might expect, I discovered that wasn't exactly reasonable, but it took several years to reach that conclusion.
I suppose things started off so well because the property was desperate for attention when we arrived. We spent the first couple of years eradicating all of the invasive vines growing around the house and pond. The list of those vines was long—poison ivy, English ivy, Greenbrier, and trumpet vine were just a few of the plants we had to hack our way through. Once we got them and other undesirable plants cleared, the soil underneath treated us like liberators. Every new plant we added thrived, and it wasn't long before we really did have beautiful gardens around the house.
Things started to shift in the wrong direction once word got out among the deer, rabbits, and Japanese beetles that we had a veritable all-you-can-eat salad bar on offer here. Then a shockingly aggressive weed showed up, colonizing almost every square inch of cultivated soil. It was back-breaking work to try and keep up with all of the problems, and my editing business started to claim altogether too much of my time. As a result, the gardens started a slow but steady decline. While it's not all bad news around here, there's definitely a lot of room for improvement.
I can get discouraged, but I'm also pretty determined, so I wasn't going to surrender my dream of having extensive, thriving gardens. This year, we started to get a handle on the weed—which has a very appropriate common name of "gripeweed"—by laying cardboard on top of any exposed soil and covering it with a two-inch thick layer of compost. That significantly cut down on our labor and gave us hope that we could turn the tide.
In the vegetable garden, we methodically pulled every weed from the gravel paths in daily 30-minute increments. Now that they're visibly clean, we're going to move into phase two of the garden reclamation, which is lifting and sifting all of the gravel to remove as much soil and weed seeds as we can.
It's going to be really hard work, but I think it will be satisfying work that will yield the results we want. So, as we roll up our sleeves and get to work, I'll be sending dispatches every Friday to keep you updated. I hope you'll brew yourself a cup of hot tea or coffee, sit down, relax, and get some encouragement to dive into your own creative pursuits.