Garden Recovery and Rebuild

 One of the big selling points for my home was the established garden plot. Here is the picture from the Zillow listing:

It was very wild when we bought the house, but I knew I could get it under control and producing again with some time and effort. In my initial assessments, I knew that I had three beds (south, center, and north), with paver paths running between the south and center beds and I assumed between the center and north beds, but it was so overgrown I couldn't see but a few of the pavers. What I didn't realize is that there were decades of rotted out boards, pipes, tomato cages, chicken wire, hog panels, rabbit fence, rebar, plastic sheeting, hoses, and pavers buried in layers of yard debris, weeds, and neglected plants. 

I started working to restore the original garden plot, but upon further inspection I realized it all had to come out. Everything was rotted out and ruined and the soil was in such bad condition that I'd need to amend it for several seasons before I could really start to benefit from GOOD dirt. I started to plan and dream and decided to take it down to bare earth, build a wall, and enclose it with farm fence to keep out the local varmints. Our yard is plagued with rabbits and while I am a huge fan of the book, I don't want to turn my backyard garden into the host for the Watership Down warren.

Last winter I began the process of pulling out all of the posts and wire wrapped around the garden plot with no rhyme or reason, which then led to pulling up miles of brittle soaker pipe. I've been photo documenting the process as I've gone, but sadly it's been slow going due to family issues, heat, and work demands. Still, I did make a bit of progress last winter.

I started on the bed that was the easiest of the three, the south bed. The east edge of the bed was covered in piles of yard debris, mostly palm fronds which do not compost very well and take a long time to breakdown. The bed didn't have too much growth in it, just some random herbs, tall weeds, and a mango tree. 

I managed to clear out a significant number of poles, wire, hoses, and weeds. To weed the garden, I crawled through every inch on my hands and knees and worked them out, bit by bit until nothing remained. My husband was very scornful of the process, but I'm happy to say it paid off big time this year when it was time to till.

It took me most of a weekend to get the south bed recovered. I'd removed at least an entire trailer load of debris from the bed but left behind the boards because I wanted to do all of the boards at once. At this point in the recovery process, I was still committed to just restoring the beds since this one really just needed the borders reestablished with new boards. I'd tried to pull out all of the posts and rebar, but these were buried too deep or had broken off closer to the ground and I couldn't get them out unassisted. I'd pulled out the mango tree from the bed and placed it in a pot. I later determined it was not grafted and wouldn't produce fruit, so I had it hauled off for disposal.

Then it was time to move on to the center bed. I worked on the center bed for the rest of the three-day weekend, but weather came down on me and I had to call it quits before I was finished. This bed didn't seem too bad, especially compared to the looming threat of the north bed on the right side of the picture, but looks were very deceiving. This bed was my trouble bed, it was full of rebar instead of pipes, and even now after we've tilled it out I've still been pulling out rotten hoses and buried pavers.

The center bed was where the previous owner was actually composting vegetable scraps, eggs, kitchen waste, and red solo cups. I wish I was joking. I've probably pulled out an entire Sam's Club sized bag of solo cups from this part of the garden. I have no clue why they were in there, but they were and they had to go. 

I removed as much of the chicken wire and poles as I could, but again, those poles were deeply embedded and reluctant to come out. There was also a row of t posts with a panel of hog wire in here, perhaps to act as a trellis, I'm honestly not sure. Worst of all, this was the bed that hosted most of the irrigation for the garden plot. You can see in the above photo that I was attempting to retain the hoses, mostly so I could follow them to their source and replace them when the time came to get the garden going in earnest. I didn't make nearly as much progress on this bed as I'd have liked, but when a thunderstorm strikes in Florida, you seek shelter immediately.

And then life got insane. I kicked off another solar project while simultaneously closing out my current one, my kid kind of went off the deep end in regard to mental health, and I sank into a very deep depression. What little energy I had left after work and family was dedicated to staring blankly into space and fishing because fishing brought me joy. Then it got HOT and for a native Floridian to spell that word in all caps means it was extremely hot. I'd wake up early and plan to get out to the garden before it warmed up too much and it would already be in the upper 80s with the feels like temps in the mid-90s as soon as the sun broke the horizon. It was so miserable all I could do was sit under an AC vent with a fan on full blast or hide in the swimming pool under the shade umbrella. It was so hot this summer our pool got up to 96 degrees. It was dangerous heat levels, and no work could take place.

We had a few cool snaps in September so I did make a valiant attempt to get started on clearing the north bed. I wanted to get the garden started this winter and if I didn't start making progress soon, it would never happen. We'd been in the house almost an entire year and I still hadn't even finished removing all of the debris, I was so disappointed in myself. Over one weekend I got in there and ripped out every single pipe and piece of rebar that I could dislodge, weed eated the north bed, and cleared out the remaining metal debris. I got the bed covered in plastic and hoped that by the time it officially cooled off enough to work in the garden I'd have cooked out all of the grasses and weeds that were growing wild.

It is a testament to the heat levels that I only took one picture, and that was after I'd finished the work. I am big on photo journaling the progress of this journey, but it was too damn hot. It took two mornings to get this bed knocked down and you can see that the center bed, left of photo, was already back to tall grass, the grass in the north bed was taller than me. I know I gave myself heat exhaustion on Saturday and when I finally called it around 11:30 AM, I ran straight to the pool to try and cool myself off before I hit a critical point. When I jumped into the 94-degree pool, it felt like an ice bath, and I almost shocked myself by cooling off too quickly. The heat had sapped me so completely I ended up going to bed for the rest of the day and slept through the night with a glass of water and bottle of gatorade on the nightstand. 

I did get an earlier start on Sunday morning before the sun was fully up and managed to accomplish my goal before it got too terribly hot. I was very careful about hydration and taking shaded breaks as often as I needed instead of pushing myself to the point of almost passing out. As a result, I was able to stay awake for the rest of the day and enjoy my usual Sunday church service of mimosas in the pool with the husband. 

And again, the garden sat for months, but that sitting time was planned. I knew I wouldn't have time to work in there again until after Christmas. During the holiday I approached my son with an offer, because I knew I couldn't do it on my own: bring your strong, young friends over and I'll pay them $15/hr to finish the demo work and build my wall. The offer was accepted, and a date was scheduled. 

I'll post later with the progress another time, it's late and even though I'm working from home tomorrow, I still need to get some sleep.