The first year in our new house was devoted to decorating, organizing, figuring out how we all would adjust to this very different space. I had hoped to be able to get back to gardening, but what was supposed to be the lawn and garden area was a discouraging expanse of former hog pasture dominated by jimson weeds, burdock and buried car parts. We had fitted the house close to the edge of a stand of virgin timber, at an angle to avoid removing any of the lovely old oak trees surrounding the small pond. While Mother Nature had done a pretty good job of landscaping (views from the deck and windows were spectacular) the lawn had to be established before we could decide what would be the best places for shrubs, flowers and a vegetable garden. This meant living a whole year to see what nature offered during the different seasons, and how our house and activities affected and were affected by the natural environment.
That first spring, I transplanted most of my daffodils from the yard in town to a sunny hillside next to the woods and moved the large collection of iris from the old farmhouse yard to the edge of our new driveway, but what other “gardening” I did was limited to flowers in planter boxes on the deck. By the end of that first summer, my husband had decided on several fruit trees and a magnolia tree. It made sense to establish an orchard before a garden, as trees took longer to become established than rhubarb, asparagus and other garden perennials.
I roamed the timber, looking for mushrooms (none) and discovered delicious wild plums, raspberry bushes and an apple tree, possibly grown from a discarded apple core tossed aside by a hiker many years before. There were wild grapes draped along the fence; enough to be worth harvesting for the best grape jelly I ever tasted. As I encountered the huge, towering oak and walnut trees, I realized that many of them were probably over two hundred years old and imagined native Americans hunting deer and raccoons and gathering nuts and berries in this very same stand of virgin timber. A small stream trickled through the woods in spring and early summer, on its journey to join Rapid Creek and the Iowa River as it had long before it had been slowed by the dirt dam which created our small pond.
For several years, I had bought tomatoes for canning from a woman who lived on a farm near North Liberty. I had discovered, the previous summer, that she had injured her back and cut down on her gardening activities. I was going to have to find another source for tomatoes. Realizing that I didn’t need to have a regulation garden to grow a few tomato plants, I thought, why not try raising my own?
The new lawn looked green and healthy. I would discover that, although the clay-laden soil was sticky and difficult to till, it held moisture well and seemed to have more nutrients than its pale color hinted. I stripped the sod from a couple three-foot squares in a sunny part of the lawn where the garden hose would reach and fashioned two chicken-wire “cages” about a foot across to place in the centers of the squares. Then I drove to town and bought eight little tomato plants and a bag of rich, black topsoil. The baby tomato plants lived on the deck for a few days where they could become accustomed to the wind and sunshine while I distributed most of the topsoil between the two patches stripped of sod and gathered yard and kitchen waste to establish little compost piles inside the two wire cylinders. The tomato plants had already grown noticeably after just three days when I planted them, one in each corner of the two squares. I watered the compost cages, fed the little plants a dose of tomato food and trusted Mother Nature to take over. My husband viewed my innovation with skepticism and promised to help me plant a “real garden” the next spring. The plants seemed to double in size every day and it wasn’t long before they were loaded with blossoms and the tiny green marbles of what would be a bumper harvest of red, juicy, delicious tomatoes – not only enough for eating, but for almost enough canned tomatoes to last until spring when my husband brought home a garden tiller and prepared a large garden plot to my specifications.
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