Flaming Llama

I’ve always struggled with growing plants, so when I mentioned to my husband that I wanted to start a garden, his immediate reaction (very appropriately, I might add) was bewilderment. He was, in every sense of the word, completely shocked. I had sworn years ago that I would never get into plants again after I managed to kill three plants in quick succession, weeks after I’d purchased them from a garden boutique in San Antonio called “Plant Shoppe.”

So when I brought up the idea of building a garden, I knew it was going to be a tough sell. I had always admired others who had been willing and able to get their hands dirty and grow their own food out of the comfort of their yards. So I swallowed my pride, said, “Fuck it, we ball,” and began planning the garden out.

We live in Zone 9a, which is Central Texas, which is also another way of saying, horrifically hot for most of the year. In the summer, it can feel like you walked into the world’s largest oven. I, however, had a piece of paper and a dream. And so I went off.

I decided to follow one of my coworkers’ advice and, instead of going with my original wooden raised garden bed idea, I chose concrete blocks. Concrete blocks are great, in my opinion, for a few reasons:

• They’ve got pre-built holes where you can plant marigolds or other small plants that will help keep pests out of the garden
• They’re heavy enough that they won’t be blown away on high-wind days
• They’re easy to stack
• They’re $1.95 at Lowe’s

The real selling point, truthfully, was the price tag. I knew we were going to blow our meager budget if we proceeded with wood, especially knowing that it would deteriorate and require replacement sooner rather than later, so concrete blocks seemed the natural remedy for this issue.

And so we started! I didn’t get photos of the whole process, but we first chose an area of our yard that would be sunny enough for plants to grow, but sufficiently out of the way for us to be able to still host parties in the back if we wanted to. I didn’t want the garden to be in the center of the yard, even though I knew it would be best for my ADHD, because I knew I eventually wanted to host a garden party of some sort, or a small cookout, and that would make the set up difficult in the long run. I also have had a dream of owning a dog at some point, so putting the garden in the center is not conducive to being able to play and/or hang out with a dog in the yard.

The corner we chose was the furthest from our home, which worked out in our favor when we realized that it was also, incidentally, the most level part of the yard. It wasn’t completely level, but it was sufficient enough for us to begin pulling weeds and tilling the earth to remove any weed remnants, dead grass and other miscellaneous obtrusions so that we could lay some landscaping fabric down.

Now, the jury is still out on landscaping fabric, but truthfully, I really appreciated being able to put it down and rid myself of the worry of weeds growing through the beds and sapping nutrients from the vegetables and herbs in the garden. When we laid the fabric down and began using landscaping staples to secure it in place, we came across one of the most annoying things we had to deal with in the whole process: rocky Texas soil. It turns out that everywhere we wanted to put a staple down, there happened to be some stone that laughed at our endeavors. We did win the battle at the end of the day, but man, was it an annoying one to have to fight.

After we set the fabric down, we went ahead and put the concrete blocks down. We chose to do two separate beds instead of one, so we created two squares and got to work filling the beds with soil. I chose to fill the holes in the concrete blocks first to get the marigolds in the soil, which made me realize that I needed one more 40lb bag of soil to be able to finish putting all 56 marigolds in the “ground.” That was my first clue that my initial math was off. Did I listen? Dear reader, of course not.

As we were filling the beds, we realized that we had greatly underestimated the amount of soil that would be necessary to fill both beds to the top, which is what we needed to do since we chose to do only one row of concrete blocks and not two in order to conserve funds. We ended up not conserving funds at all, and actually overspent from our original budget, due to my egregious miscalculations for our soil needs. We started off with six 1.5 cu ft bags total of Miracle Gro’s Organic Raised Bed Soil (yes, we used Miracle Gro, I know, don’t come for me), and two bags of cow shit (which is my affectionate term for Black Kow Compost) which was hopelessly way too little soil. We went back to Lowe’s and bought three more bags thinking we could use one more in each bed, and well, that wasn’t the case. So we went to Costco and loaded up with four more 1.5 cu ft bags, and that did the trick, mostly. Enough for me to call it quits on buying more soil and just taking it as is. Next year, I’ll definitely just buy it in bulk from a landscaping company.

Once we filled the beds, we went ahead and began filling in the other sections of the area with mulch, and setting up a brick border at the edge of the landscaping fabric to encase the area as much as we could. Then, we went ahead and focused on our pots, which are in the true corner of the yard, and hold a very small strawberry plant, a small citronella plant, and a new blueberry tree/bush that we bought at a local nursery.

So far, we’ve had the following issues, likely based on my own lack of experience in gardening:

• yellowing leaves on my San Marzano tomato plant
• small holes from some sort of bug on one of my Garden Sage plants
• sugar ants of some sort crawling ALL over my basil (rude)
• and a small yellow spot growing on my strawberry plant.

But we’ve also had these really cool things happen:

• Our wildflower cut garden started to sprout almost immediately
• our basil is starting to flower and go to seed, which I’m very very excited about and also sad about
• our marigolds have stayed thriving
• our rosemary has continued to grow and expand
• and I’ve found that I LOVE touching dirt.

This weekend, we’ll finish moving our blueberry tree/bush into a pot and probably fix our front lawn as much as we can, to prepare to tackle our next yard project: tilling and reseeding our front lawn so that our HOA stops fining us over it.

Check out some of our progress/current pics: