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How many years have you been gardening? Ever since I built the house – 40 years. I started out with my vegetable garden. I got serious about my hostas and landscaping in the past 15 to 16 years.
What brought on that seriousness? I knew I was going to retire. I enjoyed it. I discovered hostas, and they are easy to grow.
They looked nice, and the more we expanded the garden, the more we wanted to expand it. We kept coming up with new ideas for things to put in the garden.
I put in a pergola. I’ve got a wishing well. We have what we call a seating area. I made a wooden bench and the area has a back wall, arch and wings coming out. It also has columns on each side with Boston ferns.
We have a dry creek bed, so I made a bridge that you can walk across.
How would you characterize your garden? It’s kind of hard to say what I would characterize it as. I don’t know how to put that into words.
OK, then; what do you like most about your garden? Going and looking at it at the end of the day. There are a lot of viewing points in the garden.
We have a lot of statuaries; some of them are 4 and 5 feet tall. We have it lit at night. We have low-voltage lights, about 80 low-voltage lights that light up the pathways. In my mini garden, I have a small gazebo that I built a small bridge and a light tower.
We have about 2 3/4 acres. It was all natural woods when we bought it. We had to clear a lot of that out when we bought it.
I have more than 20 gardens that I have named so my wife, Karen, and I know which one we’re talking about when we talk about the gardens.
What sorts of names? We have a koi pond, so it’s called the Pawn Garden; one is called the Red Dragon garden. It’s got a statue in it and a big Japanese maple.
We have a Norway Spruce Garden because it’s got a large Norway spruce in it. Another is called a Fat Albert Garden. It has a blue spruce variety called Fat Albert. We also have the Hosta Garden.
Is all of that hard to maintain? (Laughing) Yeah. It’s a full-time job. It is. I’ve been retired now for 10 years, and it is a full-time job, and my wife’s just recently retired and she helps me maintain it.
You’re fighting weeds and leaves and sticks coming down. We’ve got all kinds of critters. There’s always something.
There’s never a day that you say, “I don’t have anything to do.” At the end of the day, you say, “well, I want to save a little bit for tomorrow.” It’s a lot of upkeep.
Do you still have a vegetable garden? Yes. It’s all raised beds. I framed them. The frames are about three feet by 8 inches high and 12 feet long. I’ve got 12 different beds and planted a variety of different things in each bed.
What have you planted? Tomatoes, green beans, peas and cabbage and peppers and onions, squash, red beets, pickles, potatoes …
How have things done this year? This year they’ve done pretty good. Some of the tomatoes came on slow because of the weather.
We’ve got rhubarb and asparagus. And we have three different grapevines by the vegetable garden.
All my gardens that I have and all my landscaping, they’re inside retaining walls. I have them lined up. Most everything I have is in a garden setting, even around my vegetable garden. I have it inside a retaining wall. And my paths are mulched.
How much time do you spend outside enjoying the garden? Maybe an hour a day. At the end of the day, you grab a beer or a glass of wine and you go back in there. We have 10 benches where we can view our garden from different viewpoints.
You drink a little wine and sip a little beer and make plans for tomorrow – what you’re going to do.
This is a work in progress. My wife says, “That’s enough,” and then we start wondering what we can do over there, and then we go do something over there.
