September in Wisconsin

I know it's a strange time of year to start blogging about gardens, but the truth is my desire to garden has finally returned. I lost my desire years ago when the place we lived was all clay and impossible to grow anything. I tried for years to find a way to get the ground to cooperate. It took digging out the clay and replacing those areas with dirt. It was no easy task and though I was able to grow many beautiful things there, the workload was such that I eventually tired out.

Now we live in a place with the most beautiful dirt you could ever imagine. I love my new yard but still it took almost a year to recover from the difficulty of dealing with clay, not to mention that when we moved here the yard was a mess and it took most of that year just to get it to the point that gardens are even possible.

I remember back when we were looking at this place (it had been abandoned for a year) the yard was four feet tall, all around. An acre and a half of nothing but weeds, and thistles and burdock. Anyone that knows burdock knows how difficult it can be, especially with dogs. We had thousands of them to deal with, and considering each plant contains hundreds of sharp little point seed pods that get stuck in the fur of the dogs, you can imagine what a nightmare it was here when we first moved in. It took a month of work, just to get the yard to a place where we could walk through. ...and then it turned into winter.

It took another month in the spring to find and destroy all the rest of the little devils so that the dogs could go outside without coming back covered in painful nastiness. When the task was done, the floods hit and the yard became too wet to deal with. Finally everything broke and we got to the point of thinking about gardens.

I remember the first time I stepped into the garden and put my shovel in the ground. It was one of the saddest things I found. Though the dirt was beautiful, the people who lived here prior to us must have felt the gardens made a better dumping ground than a place to plant. The things I found in the ground amaze me to this day. Everything from concrete blocks, to beer cans to plastic bottles. We even found an old weight set that apparently belonged to Gold's Gym (as they weights were all labeled as such). I couldn't believe it. ... and that was only in one garden. They found the vegetable garden must have made a better burn pit than planting area, and according to the neighbor, they went out there ritually to burn couches, chairs, mattresses, carpet, an who knows what else. When I stuck my shovel in there, I found pounds and pounds of wire, metal and springs. It was incredible, and not in the good way.

So, after spending a summer of cleaning up someone else's thoughtless garbage, I am ready to begin. Problem is, now it's fall... so, even though I have the bug, the gardens will have to wait until next year.