Photography And Half-Thoughts By Mitchell Hegman

...because some of it is pretty and some of it is not.

Monday, August 22, 2022

In the Name of a Garden

I literally live on a pile of rocks.  My house rests atop a huge wash of stone and sand swept into place by flooding at the end of the last ice age.

While many of the rocks are pretty, none are conducive to growing plants.  Furthermore, it helps little that, around here, we stumble and fall before reaching thirteen inches of precipitation annually.

Not wishing to fight against nature, I established xeriscaping around my house—a scheme which uses native and dryland plants requiring little or no irrigation.  By design, most of my yard dries out and goes dormant this time of year.

Desiree arrived here from the tropics with slightly different sensibilities.  Although I do have a few leafy trees and a couple tiny flower gardens offering a few flags of green, Desiree would like to see a little more.

I can understand that.

For the last couple days, we have spent our early morning hours prepping the ground near my house for a modest garden she can tend next year.  “Prepping the ground” at my place translates into prying rocks of various size out from the first few inches ground and then bringing in topsoil to supplement the poor earth remaining.

I have posted a photograph of the second wheelbarrow-load of rocks we worked up from the ground.



Our Second Load of Rocks



Our Modest Garden Patch

Mitchell Hegman

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