Randy dug the footings, Ronnie poured the concrete, and Roy laid the bricks to build my garden wall. Then Drew stopped by to see what was going on and asked, “What’s that for?”
“I’m building a wall around my garden,” I replied with a proud smile.
“Why?” Drew asked pointedly.
“Well,” I started slowly, “My dogs kept running through the garden tearing things up.”
“Whyn’t you pen up your dogs instead?” He asked with a chuckle. “Would’ve been a whole lot cheaper.”
Drew drove off in his pick-up and left me wordless in the driveway. The reason I didn’t just pen up my dogs is that we used to live in the city. We had bought our first house in Chapel Hill, NC and proceded to garden like all the other city folks. Frank made a cold frame and we raised seedlings that we transplanted into carefully prepared raised beds. We observed haute horticulture at The Fearrington House and aspired to recreate it at our house. Despite my city ways in my mind I was still my farmer grandfather’s girl and so I failed to see how far I had ventured from country gardening until Drew laughed at me.
In Danville, Virginia where space is plentiful and heavy equipment available backyard gardening includes planting ten acres in tomatoes, squash, beans and corn. The fertile fields yield bountiful harvests without any consideration of a raised bed. The large acreage makes linear flower beads, rows of vegetables and fields of corn possible without confinement. Tin pans jangling in the breeze, scarecrows and other folklore tricks protect the crops from deer and racoons. Trellises are scarce and walls are unnecessary.
My garden wall had been built in the midst of this farming community and I pledged to stand behind it. I decided to defend myself with an offensive of bluff and rhetoric. It has taken as much planning as my herb bed, but I have improved my skill with each growing season. At any social gathering in the spring and summer the talk will be about the weather outlook or cutting hay and I’ll interject with, “You know, I’m an avid gardner. I have a walled garden. It’s a big brick wall around my vegetable bed. My tomatoes are in. I have herbs, too.”
Some sun-wrinkled skeptical farmer always takes the bait, “Why’d you build a wall around it?”
I look him square in the eye and carefully explain, “The garden wall creates a special environment. Within the wall there are microclimates. The bricks absorb light and provide extra warmth during the winter. The wall prevents some of the cold winter wind from blowing directly on the plants.” I pause my dissertation for a moment to ease a speck of garden soil from beneath the edge of my left fourth fingernail. “I have three foot Rosemary plants in my garden that are marginally hardy here in zone 7, but they survive nicely in my walled garden,” I conclude.
This past winter I ordered hairy vetch as a ground cover for my vegetable bed. The bed was a tangle of running vines and purple flowers in the early spring. “Tech did a study,” I would patiently explain to my garden club friends. “They found that tomatoes grown where vetch had been the winter ground cover did better.” I would have started a hairy vetch trend, I believe, except the vetch was a blade gripping nightmare at rototilling time.
Last week our horse pasture and hay growing near-neighbors walked through my walled garden. My friend, Frank, complimented my tomatoes and gazing over the garden said to his wife, “Look how nice that hardwood mulch works. You should use that mulch, Paige, instead of pine straw in our garden.”
Paige, who is harder to lead and fake than most people was quick to reply, “But Frank, she has crabgrass, too.”
“Yea,” Frank replied, “But she’ll pull that up.”
In a quick summation of my position I determined that I was looking at endless weeding on the one hand or bluffing the nonbeliever on the other. The words flowed sweetly from my lips like the strangling tendrils of my watermelon vine, “Recently, tech has determined that certain types of grasses such as the southern light- green seedless crabgrasses are excellent companion plants for a variety of acid-requiring vegetable plants such as the heirloom tomato.” With a touch more chicken manure I’ll have bluff and rhetoric so tall I’ll have to tie it to my six-foot steel tomato stakes to prevent it from flopping.