Behind garden number 1.......

This isn't my first - or even my second garden since migrating to Georgia. It's my third. But it's important to touch on the first two and what was learned (or not learned) from them.
I tell people I'm the sum total of my mistakes - you learn very little from blind success, and I'm more than happy to talk about my failures and what was learned in the process.


So, garden number one.  A big bonus in moving to Georgia from Las Vegas was the thought of growing my own food. I'd been fondly recalling my Mother's gardens of my childhood and how fresh things tasted - I'd also been watching the BBC's 'River Cottage' series and although that lifestyle was out of reach, I liked some of the notions put forward in it.  So moving to Georgia, and into an apartment - albeit larger than my 1br Las Vegas upper story, and actually having a very small space that passed as 'a yard' (considering for 10 years 'a yard' either wasn't something that came with a rental property - or was a collection of rocks and called 'desert landscaping' - this thought it utterly beyond me as you don't tend to forget what the desert looks like WHEN YOU'RE SURROUNDED BY ONE).  And so my little 10x15 of green seemed to me jam packed with possibilities (that no one else seemed to see).

 I managed to dig up the only photos I could find.  Not the greatest quality and taken when the garden was young.  At this point we found out we had kids on the way - my son and daughter (twins) - so throwing money into a huge gardening project wasn't going to happen, and being a rental and a apartment to boot - containers were the word of the day. Whatever I could find on special at the dollar store - whatever I could find at a yard sale, or donated from friends - but the best ones (if you look closely) were gallon milk jugs - any container I could find and cut up. Anything that would hold a plant was used.

 It did expand beyond these photos. It ended up being fairly impressive and producing a fair amount of greens.  It seemed everything I put in the soil sprang forth green and I could do no wrong.  I bought whatever soil I could get at the dollar store at 2 bucks a bag.  Put in seeds, water, and away I went.

When things would start to turn down, I would totally fluke into things that would spring everything back to life, or yield benefits I wouldn't understand for years.

Things like companion planting, or getting just the right variety of spinach by dumb luck that let me harvest it constantly - 12 plants to a window box - and have it never bolt to seed.  I made a worm bin as an experiment out of a kitty litter bucket - caught worms from the backyard to put in it (50 or so I think - looking back it's laughable) but I couldn't get the castings out of the bottom (what little I got) and so I filled it with water then in frustration watered the plants with it over the next few months (worm tea....).  Success without the slightest bit of understanding.

I grew over half the families intake of veg and herbs out of a tiny area with very little cost.

I never achieved this level of success again.