Looking up the hill
About a 1,000 people visit my Internet Gardening page each month, and some ask about my personal garden. I've described it in only the sketchiest terms on my personal web page, so here are some more details for those who want to know more.
I didn't set out to design an aerobic garden, it just worked out that way given the lay of the land.
Looking up the hill
The garden is way up there, past the birdbath bear, the Mugho pines, the grape vines, the black raspberries, and past the crest of the hill with the red raspberries and the heavily pruned (some might say mutilated) Pfitzer junipers. Of course, this slope isn't even considered a hill where I previously lived in Morgantown, WV. But here in Blacksburg, VA, it's considered a right good climb, especially if you have a bag of fertilizer under your arm. As with most other images on this page, click on the image to see a larger view (1,000 pixels wide) in a new window.
[IMPORTANT: Please make sure that your Web browser is not resizing images. By default, Internet Explorer version 6 shrinks images to fit the browser window. You can turn off this image reformatting by clicking on Tools/Internet Options/Advanced/Multimedia and unchecking the box labeled Enable Automatic Image Resizing. The large version of the panoramas linked to the small ones on this page are 2000 pixels wide, wider than most monitors will display.]
My 2,000 square feet of tilled ground lies at 2,100 feet above sea level in Blacksburg's superb mountain climate. The most critical point about the altitude is not so much the height above sea level as the height relative to the roof of my two-story house. Since my gardening tools are down here and my garden is way up there, gardening is an aerobic activity as I climb the steep slope of my back yard with tools, buckets of water, the tiller, or a bale of peat moss. I hope the effort is keeping me young.
When I climbed the hill about 1:30 PM on a hazy July 4th , the garden looked beautiful to my eyes. The weeds were mostly conquered, so I had time to take some photos.
Fortunately my backyard hill flattens out on top and has a southern exposure. From the front corner of the garden, looking southeast, we see the eggplant thriving in the foreground. Behind the eggplant is the asparagus bed that I planted in spring 2002. It came into full production this spring. Partially hidden behind the asparagus are the summer squash, and beyond them to the left are the butternut and acorn squash beds mulched with newspaper. Past the squash is the corn patch. Oh, and the bare patch to left of center is reserved for the fall broccoli and cauliflower that I should be planting around the 2nd week of August..
Walking around to the back of the garden and looking due north gives us a better view of the Silver Queen corn in the center of this picture. It should be ready to eat by early August.
![Click for large view [523 KB, 2500 pixels wide]](images/GardenFullRear-2500px.jpg)
To the right of the corn is the somewhat sparse potato patch and the remnants of the spring broccoli at the far right. To the left of the corn are 4 Supersonic tomato plants and two cherry tomato plants growing in cages just below what's left of the compost heap.
This year has been almost perfect for gardening. We've had adequate rain at appropriate intervals, so I didn't have to carry buckets of water or drag the hose up the hill.
|
August 3, 2004 |
August 7, 2004 | |
|
The corn is ready Granddaddy! |
Granddaddy! I found the potatoes. | |
 |
 |
|
By September 11, the fall broccoli and cauliflower had grown large enough for me to remove the cages that I use to protect the young plants from rabbits. The corn stalks were ready to chop down, and most of the winter squash had been harvested. The tomatoes were still doing fine, but they are hidden behind the asparagus in this view. The ruby Swiss chard is just visible to the far left on the edge of the lawn in the distance.
By early October the garden is always painful to look at, so I'll save you the torment of another photograph. However, since we haven't had any frost yet, the garden is still delightful to the taste. I picked the first heads of broccoli and cauliflower during the first week of October, and I dug 125 pounds of potatoes out of the ground on October 2. The Swiss chard was still growing well, as were the egg plant and peppers, but the poor tomatoes were painful to look at and not worth picking any longer.
I picked the last tomatoes, eggplant, and peppers on Halloween. A few days later we had a hard freeze, followed by a few more nights with temperatures dipping as low as 21° F. This past Sunday I pulled out those plants, took down the tomato cages, and buried the oak leaves I had raked from the lawn. Now only the broccoli and Swiss chard are still producing. Soon the garden will be at rest.
I made a delightful spinach salad from the crop that will winter over for an early spring treat. And we are still picking broccoli from the side shoots.
Today was a beautiful day to put the garden to rest for the winter. I found a few last side shoots of broccoli that survived the bitter cold of the past few days. We had Swiss chard until a few days ago, but today the plants were withered and the ground frozen enough to prevent me from using my spading fork to remove the plants. So I chopped the plants off at ground level with my mattock and dreamed with anticipation of the spinach crop to come in about 3 months.
 Topp helps with the leaves, 11/6/2004 |
Some visitors to
Internet Gardening have asked after my cat, since the picture of him
helping me pick raspberries on my personal web page is now several years
old. Well, the "big guy" is 16 years old now, and still going
strong. He knows that you've got
to keep moving to stay young, so he patrols the yard daily to keep out
varmits and most other cats. The one exception is his beloved friend,
Otis, the orange tabby who lives at Andrea's house off the corner of our
yard. Having never seen a deer in our garden, I have to assume that these
valiant felines are doing their job.
In 2002, Blaktopp took to endorsing a limited number of commercial products. For instance, he took time out from his busy schedule to pose in one of the fine bandanas from the Humane Society of Montgomery County that was given to him by his good friend Martin. Anyone who thinks the bandana is too big for him has never seen a Hoot Gibson western (finding a picture of Hoot's bandana is left as an exercise for the reader). |
Page created July 30, 2004
Updated 12/23/2004
Harry_M_Kriz, [hmkriz@vt.edu]
University Libraries
Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University
Blacksburg, VA 24061-0434
