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I've always loved to garden.  Apparently, it started when I was toddler, and one fin summer day, just before the first tomatoes started to ripen, I picked them all off my mother's tomato plants and threw them into the neighbor's yard.  I have no idea why I did it - I don't even remember doing. But it must have started me on the path to gardening, because, by age 7 I had my own little garden.  And I grew some of the most pathetic scrawny 2.5ft tall corn plants you ever saw.  They would have been right at home among the Munchins in Oz.

Not to be deterred by inexperience and lack of knowledge I started reading everything in the library, including gardening books, and getting a subscription to the J.I. Rodale Press's "Organic Gardening Magazine

I've gardening on two continents, and had gardens as large as 400 ft by 100 ft and as small as several containers on my porch. I learned the English style of landscaping and gardening while living in London and belonging to the RHS (Royal Horticultural Society) at Wisely.

Since I recently bought a house, you can watch as I transform it from a butt-ugly, barren red clay and sod desert into a lush English garden in the flower front and vegetable and fruit garden in the back!

Here are the before pictures:

Front (before)

 April 2003

Side - before

April 2003

Back - before

April 2003

When I moved in, there was one pathetic Asian Pear tree, which the previous owners, strange Koreans, who apparently  believed that plants did not like sun, planted under the pine tree.  There was only one flower plant on the property, a crabapple which was severely battered by the lawnmowers and was about to die.

 

And now the transformation starts!
I first set about removing the exceedingly boring miniature holly shrubs and boxwoods (great in a cemetery for dead people, boring in the yard of living people.) Next was removing sod and creating vegetable and flower beds.
During - installing the drainage system
Flowerbeds in the front and apple trees - April 2003
side - April 2003
back vegetable area  - April 2003
Front - after removing the ugly shrub and adding azaleas  - April 2003
Here is the same area (well on the other side of the door) in May.
And here is the garden on May 15th

Tomatoes against the fence. grapes in the middle by the grass, raspberries toward the back!

Flowerbeds in the front and apple trees - May 2003

 

 

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All images and text © Copyright JB Slemmer 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 - email me at  email me at JB2005-at-jbslemmer.com

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