Gardening Excetera Column 9/10/11

OUR MINI EDIBLE ESTATE
Mary Fulè
Like many people I know in Flagstaff, I am a transplant, having moved here about 20 years ago. My family and I have been here ever since, and I am have been trying to garden here for most of that time.

I grew up in Kansas, where the issue with gardening was keeping things from getting too big. Gardening in Flagstaff is a challenge, and it has taken a long time for me to feel like I know what I am doing. My husband used to say I was pretty good at growing $50.00 tomatoes, (taking into account the number of plants that I killed before we harvested a ripe one.)

A few years ago my gardening took a big set-back when we moved to a different neighborhood in Flagstaff. We had lived up on McMillan Mesa, where it is sunny and warm and moved to Coconino Estates, to an older home with lots of shade trees and the cold-air drainage of the Rio de Flag right behind my back gate. I felt like I was going to have reinvent the wheel to get a successful back yard garden, but then I came across a book in the library, Edible Estates, by Fritz Haeg. This book is about a movement to get people to tear up their front grass lawns and plant gardens instead. Anyone interested can check out his web-site at: www.fritzhaeg.com
Reading this book was an epiphany. This was the solution I had been looking for. My front yard was warmer and sunnier so it was much better suited for a vegetable garden than my back yard. The book brought up all kinds of issues that back yard gardeners don’t need to think about, like neighbor’s reactions and lawn aesthetics, both of which are important to consider.

The next step was the logistics of getting a garden ready. One huge benefit of this new location was its past history as farmland. Our soil was black gold. We started with a small area of the yard, digging up the old sod and putting it in a pile in the middle of the front yard. This was the defining structure of our new vegetable garden. We then added a few truckloads of dirt mixed with steer manure to fill in the holes. We added some larger rocks to limit erosion and add warmth to our little hill. Finally, we put in an above ground drip system, and we were ready to plant.
Each time we worked outside, neighbors would stop by and talk about our plans and offer advice and encouragement. We spent a lot of time working on the garden that year, and we got to know quite a few people from our neighborhood. Our block has a lot of walkers and bikers, and since the garden is close to the street many people would remark on our project. We learned neighbor’s stories, histories, kids’ names, where they worked, who we knew in common and everything in between. It was an eye-opening social experience for my family. Fritz Haeg had talked about the social aspect to front yard gardening in his book, but I hadn’t put much thought into that aspect when planning our garden. For me, this ended up being one of the biggest highlights to this project.

This last summer I grew corn in circular rows with pumpkins and melons taking up the ground space. Many times people walking by would stop and talk about the garden, letting me know they had been watching it all summer and how much they enjoyed seeing it grow. We ended up with at least 4 pumpkins weighing in at 25 pounds, big bright orange globes, peeking through huge green prickly leaves, with reddish tinted corn towering over the pumpkins like sentinels.

Our front yard garden has been successful as a small producer of fresh, organic vegetables, but the two unexpected bonuses for me was sharing the beauty of the garden with others and the added community that our garden brings to our neighborhood. It’s our own version of a “front porch.”

Mary Fulè is a Master Gardener Graduate and works in NAU’s Extended Campus. Dana Prom Smith (http://highcountrygardener.blogspot.com) edits Gardening Etcetera and can be reached at stpauls@npgcable.com.