Dawn,

"Forgotten many"???! I can't imagine you could remember any more! What a complete and fulfilling list! You are just overflowing with knowledge...just as Plaid said. You will never know how much this means to me! I know those lists took you quite a bit of time (each) and I want to thank you so much for doing that for a lowly little beginner like me. What an inspiration!! Of course, now I have to ask, just how much property/land do you have that can fit all of these that you speak of growing?? Just wondering.

Well, you should know, you just caused my husband a huge, ongoing headache (if he knows what he's in for). Not only will he have to deal with my experimentation and adventure with these small beds here at our rental house, but now as we look to buy, he will have to hear me begging for a house with a large amount of "unclaimed" land for me to start huge garden areas of my own.
Yes...you, Dawn, and the other members of this forum, may have created a gardening monster! DUM DUM DUM

Well, thanks again for all your help! Wish me luck as I research more about each of these and find my favorites (or first guinea pigs). I will keep you updated on all the progress! Of course, only real progress will take place after this stinkin' rain subsides.....

Completely in awe,
Emily :)

Hi Emily,

Before I tell you how large our place is, I want you to promise me that you will stay calm and NOT hyperventilate. OK? It is going to sound like a 'gardener's dream' but most of the time it is a 'gardener's nightmare'!

We are in a very, very rural area on a piece of land that was part of a farm until about the mid-70s. After that, the land was left fallow although it was leased out for cattle grazing. During that time, no one was keeping the land cleared out, so most of it reverted to cedar trees and obnoxious brush like greenbrier and poison ivy and 'trash trees' like hackberry, ash, elms, etc. I love all trees but the trash trees are weak and short-lived and are continually sick, sickly looking, rotting, dying and crashing down.

Since purchasing this property we have spent thousands of hours and lots of $$$ on relatively inexpensive hand-held equipment like chain saws and multipurpose weedeaters that have steel cutting blades, trying to clear away the trash trees and brush. The greenbrier and poison ivy are still with us and always will be, although we work hard to keep it away from our cultivated areas and the pathways cut through the wild areas.

If I had it to do over again, I would have bought a smaller piece of property. Actually, we were looking for a 3- to 5-acre plot of land, figuring that would give me more than enough room to play in the dirt. What we ended up with was 14.4 acres, which is enough to keep me constantly exhausted, and I don't even venture onto the 10 wooded acres that much. The land is beautiful. Our woods are gorgeous and remind my husband of Pennsylvania, where he grew up. We have ponds, springs, creeks and a swamp. The wildlife is amazingly abundant, which is good and bad.

Our land is creek bottom land, so parts of it are lower lying than the land on two sides of us, which causes water to drain UNDERGROUND for weeks after a heavy rain and keeps us pretty wet and soggy for quite some time. Our house is on the highest part of the land, and we are not in an area prone to flooding, but my raised bed veggie garden some distance away from the house and on lower-lying land does have drainage issues. With this year's rain, those drainage issues have been quite apparent.

Don't get me wrong. I love this place. I love every inch of the woods and all the beautiful native understory plants. I love the open pastures which, since they aren't used for cattle any more, aren't really pastures anymore. I guess I should call them meadows. I love the wildflowers and the wildlife. It is a maintenance nightmare though.

Just mowing and weeedeating the approximate 4.4 acres that aren't wooded takes me a couple of days if the weather is dry and on my side. If it is continually wet, I often have to mow waist high grass with a wheeled weedeater (similar to a DR Field and Brush Mower) and then come back and redo it with the lawn tractor or a push mower. Weedeating takes forever. The bermuda grass we have was probably planted for haying many years before we bought the place. I know that I NEVER would have planted it.

I spend untold hours trying to get rid of that bermuda grass because it is invasive and creeps into every cultivated bed we have. It is my dream to one day get rid of all the bermuda. Little by little, I am succeeding, but it will take me another decade at the rate I am going.

We try to be good stewards of the land, removing overgrown invasive species and encouraging the good native ones. So far we have removed ALL the cedar from the 4.4 acres of open land, and now must start removing it from the wooded areas. We only work in the wooded areas in the winter when the copperheads, water moccasins and rattlesnakes are hibernating.

I have learned so much about the soil, the plants and the wildlife since we moved here. I don't regret that we bought this place and I do, in fact, want for us to spend the rest of our lives here. However, I have had to accept that most of it will NEVER look the way I want it to, and instead focus on the land closest to the house and just try to keep it under control.

Because it takes so long and is so hard to improve the soil on ever a very small piece of land, I have had to accept that most of what I grow will be plants that have to grow in red clay soil that is low in organic matter, holds tons of water when it does rain, and dries concrete-hard and cracks wide open when it doesn't rain. THAT is the reason I have had to learn so much about what does, does not, will or will not grow in clay soil.

So, when looking for land, it is important to think about your life many years down the road. Do you still want to be mowing and maintaining several acres when you are 50, 60, 70 or 80 years old? Do you have to have everything look 'just so' or can you live with the overgrown woodland and wildflower-filled meadows that don't get mowed very often? Are you OK with tons of wildlife, including poisonous snakes and lots of predators like bobcats, foxes, raccoons, skunks, coyotes, panthers and cougars? If not, rural to semi-rural acreage might not be your best choice.

I know I have sounded pretty negative, but I just want to give a realistic picture of what it is like to try to tame wild, relatively untamed land WITHOUT hiring someone with a bulldozer to come in and knock everything down, detroying decades-old trees and all the lovely wildlife habitat in the process. And, if hiring a bulldozer guy sounds easy and relatively cheap, think again. We have neighbors who hired a guy to clear and regrade their land and he spent most of TWO YEARS working on that, especially with regard to drainage issues.

I know that I have made this whole thing much harder on myself than I had to because I have insisted on doing everything as organically as possible, so we don't use herbicides like Round-up or broadleaved weedkillers containing chemicals like atrazine or 2, 4 D. I simply refuse to poison the land. I work hard to save native plants, and work even harder to remove invasive ones, especially invasive grasses like Johnson Grass.

It is worth it all to live here though. We have a beautiful place filled with all kinds of desirable wildlife like birds, butterflies, dragonflies, turtles, toads, frogs, skinks, lizards, salamanders, bunnies, etc., etc., etc. We have gorgeous sunrises and sunsets. We have a nice little 2-story Victorian house with wrap-around porches and a huge barn-style garage complete with a weather vane and cupola. We have the absolute best neighbors in the world on all sides of us and the people in our part of Love County are the nicest, kindest, most loving and giving people you will ever meet. I love it here. I suspect I would love it a lot more if we had only 4 acres, though, instead of 14.

The moral of this story....be careful what you wish for! I truly love living here, but it ain't easy!!!

Happy Growing!!
Dawn

Dawn,
I will definitely heed your advice and be careful what I wish for! Yes, 14 acres seems like quite a bit when I imagine it. I am a small-town homegrown girl, but my town was more "suburban"-like than "farm-town"-like. I appreciate your honesty, though, because my husband actually does have dreams of someday having a big plot of land for building our retirement home on. He seems more interested in the notion of grandeur: thougths of a beautiful pond/lake, meadow grasses blowing in the wind, a nice big ranch-style house for grandkids to come visit us...(he also seems somewhat interested in the investment side of it. I will have to mention the abundance of "predators" and continuous maintenance you speak about. He will likely seriously reconsider his hopes for a "huge" piece of land and opt for something more reasonable that we can manage. He cracks me up sometimes with his "big dreams". He also claims that the happiest way for him to retire would be to open a barbecue/icehouse type restaurant. He loves to grill and enjoys the occasional social beer, so he feels he would just be in absolute heaven! As many tables as I have waited in the past and as many restaurants I have worked in...I just look at him like he's crazy!
Anyhoo, I digress...
I appreciate your candor about all this. Definite things to consider when thinking of buying land/a house!
Emily :)

Hi Emily,

Pouring rain just put an end to my mowing and weedeating for the day, but I got about 2 acres done, so I am pretty happy about that.

For a little while, then, I sat in the lawn chair on the covered porch that is on the east side of the barn/garage and watched the dragonflies, damselflies, frogs and turtles in and around the pond. The rain didn't bother them as much as it bothered me, but as it began to rain more heavily, they all disappeared and I came inside the house. I do love it here.

Your husband's dream of a ranch-style home with a pond or lake and grassy meadows is lovely. I encourage y'all to 'go for it'. You see, even though it is so much harder and so much more work than I had thought it would be, I wouldn't trade the life we have here for anything else in the world. I believe that we are "living the dream" and I am grateful that we are. HOWEVER, living the dream is still a lot harder than just dreaming about it. :)

As for the dream of having his own business, I won't touch that one with a ten-foot pole!

Dawn