About Pam's Garden
Introduction
We live in old Middletown, DE, near the fire department, and in this part of town the lots of land are sometimes small and strangely shaped. Our’s is no exception. The house was built in 1940 and we have a strangely shaped one-fifth of an acre yard that is basically two rectangles that touch, just barely, at one corner. The house stands in the larger main rectangle while the other rectangle is what we call the Back Garden.
Well it wasn’t always the Back Garden, it was a mess of old evergreen trees and trash. Who could take this and make a thriving garden? Enter Pam. She dug and rototilled and amended soil and built raised beds. At five foot tall she is small, and mighty to have made this garden out of nothing.
The Back Garden
The Back Garden is packed with fruit and vegetables; a peach tree, apple trees, blackberries, green beans, squash, tomatoes, collard greens, you name it and its probably planted in our back yard. Its a small and mighty garden whose care never ends.
It starts in the summer when the garden is in full bloom as seeds are studied and mulled over for the following year. “How did this do last year? Should we try something else? Do we want more of this vegetable?” Many questions are asked and seeds are ordered. In fact, some seeds are ordered for the present year when a second planting is planned and orchestrated in the early Fall. Eventually everything is harvested except some greens that are left growing year round for our daily salads. We haven’t bought greens for years.
It's a Mighty Garden
Its a mighty garden whose origin, after the seeds are ordered, starts in the winter and early spring. Our basement is transformed into a nursery where shelves are filled with special planters just for seeds and grow lights provide an eerie atmosphere, especially in the night. I often wonder if passersby suspect we are doing something nefarious in our basement. Its just plant seedlings, you can buy the other stuff legally now!
They grow and grow and become plants just in time to be taken outside. Everything is planned to the day when the last frost is in the past and the cycle can start over again. Each cycle is unique since different types of plants are chosen to see if and where they will grow in the garden.
Bees Help!
Neighbors’ trees provide unwanted shade necessitating careful planning since the Sun changes position not only during the day but throughout the year. Early in the season the Sun may provide a lot of energy to the plants but as it changes position overs weeks this can change. The calculus required to determine what plant should go in a certain place is immense and all consuming to Pam.
She toils everyday, and I mean everyday; digging, weeding, transplanting, trimming, getting mad at rabbits and Asian jumping worms and stung by bees (apparently solitary bees, not honey bees, are the worst as they can repeatedly sting!) as well as screening mulch. She starts in the morning with her cup of coffee as she wanders through the garden performing a thorough inspection with the dogs following her every move. She then looks at her list of things to do and plans for the day ahead and off she goes as busy as the bees who similarly toil every day. Our bees provide honey for us, yet perhaps the most valuable chore they do is to pollinate the plants in our neighborhood. Our neighbors told us how many more flowers, fruit and vegetables they get as a result of our bees.
Other Gardens
We have other gardens too in the main house “rectangle” to provided foliage that attracts insects. On the one side Pam planted a native garden around a legacy Magnolia tree. The tree is getting bigger every year and is becoming more beautiful. The native plants around it only accentuate its beauty and are a hive of activity providing plenty of food for the various pollinators; solitary bees, butterflies even hummingbirds. On the other side we have the River Garden, a garden conceptualized by me. I wanted a more wandery type of garden so it looked like a river coming from our backyard. It has some native plants in it, but the concept I wanted was it should be purple and yellow colored. I don’t know why, but I saw a purple colored tree at a local garden store and liked it. I wanted to build something around that tree and after we toiled for a couple of days it came to fruition. A couple of years later, with Pam adding a slew of other plants, it looks truly beautiful.
The Goal
Our goal is to introduce more plants and trees to our neighborhood so pollinators, birds and other fauna have a place to live and thrive. We even have lightening bugs coming back, most of them left when people got rid of bushes and trees in place of having a grass–based yard. These types of yards are terrible for the local environment and are basically a desert. Do you think the local fauna are gleefully appreciative of all the grass? No.
We are gradually eliminating most of the grass from our yard leaving only pathways to travel between the gardens. We have one area that only has a crepe myrtle and we are planning what has to be the last garden we can possible have.... What can its concept be? That can be decided in the Fall, when the dirt is softer after we get more rain, and Pam has performed her research.
All these supposed nonproductive gardens help drive the engine of our house, the Back Garden, by supplying pollinators and other helpful insects to increase our yield. Pam can’t do it alone.
Photographs by Doug Baker