Before the driveway! Our side yard dirt garden
I know that 2019 happened - my calendar is full of events and activities. I recall fostering puppies, taking a trip to Utah, having a really productive garden, melting in the heat of summer, a family vacation at the beach, lots of great speaking events, and deciding for our rapidly upcoming move to Hendersonville NC (along with many other things). Yet, it was truly a blur - 12 months, 52 weeks, 365 days went by at the speed of light. Slow down, time! Please!
One of my favorites from this house
2020 promises to be a really interesting year. We are on the cusp of our move (Sue and I are surrounded by boxes, closing date is less than a week away, and the transportation of our “stuff” one week later). My 2020 garden is a blank log with infinite possibilities, waiting to be filled in. Sue and I will celebrate our 40th anniversary in December. We will have a new town to explore, new customs and patterns to create, new people to meet. I’ve got some great speaking events awaiting, sprinkled throughout the year. We are so ready - beyond ready! - and can’t wait to wake up for the first time in our new home.
Caitlin with my dad, Wilfred, during a Christmas visit
We’ve lived in this house for 28 years - that’s a lot of memories. Our daughters spent the majority of their lives in this house. Parents, friends and relatives visited. Two books and countless quilts were created here. Sue and I are both leaving some dear friends. Just the act of packing and decluttering meant riffling through so many pictures and other memorabilia. It’s been quite a last few weeks, that’s for sure (I’ve sprinkled some of those pictures throughout this blog).
Sara and Caitlin on Easter chilling on the hammock
And the gardens! Our first garden here, a hand-dug 30 by 50 foot square, was planted in 1993. We planted 27 gardens here, and varieties like Cherokee Chocolate, Cherokee Green, Lucky Cross and Little Lucky arose in those gardens (not to mention the entirety of the span of the Dwarf Tomato Project, which began in 2005).
In 1993, our first Raleigh garden, I grew 74 different tomato varieties and 38 pepper varieties. Some tomato highlights were a tomato sent by a seed saver as an off-type from Yellow Brandywine that ended up, in collaboration with Carolyn Male, as OTV Brandywine. I grew my first dwarf variety - Golden Dwarf Champion, a Burpee variety from the 1890s, sent to me by seed saver Ken Ettlinger the previous year. Cherokee Purple shone in it’s first year in a North Carolina garden. I fell in love with Brandywine here, and it was the best tasting tomato in that 1993 garden.
Another view of a pre-driveway, real in the ground dirt garden (when we had enough sun on that location!)
In a future blog, I want to report on the results of a garden log counting project - summarizing exactly how many different tomato, pepper and eggplants were grown in our Raleigh garden - be it in the dirt in that side garden, the deck or driveway in containers or straw bales. My gardens here were incredibly interesting, and a load of useful research and development transpired. I can only hope to approach such success in our new Hendersonville gardens. They will certainly be different - more broad in crop types - and will provide new discoveries and interesting results. I can’t wait to tell you about them in future blogs and newsletters.
May you all have wonderful 2020 gardens!
Reading a book with some drama to the girls one Christmas Eve