past garden projects number three fowler

Sometimes you just have to push the boulder uphill and like it. The Fowler Street garden had several strikes against it even before Noel and I got started on it. First, there was no water source. Second, I was going to be leaving town for a summer long road trip just as everything was getting started. Third, we thought that maybe the asphalt shingles and roofing tar that we dug up had contaminated the soil. (A soil test for heavy metals showed that the soil was fine.) Starting the tilling led to the discovery of a forth strike – an infestation of kudzu that took several days to rip out and contain.

The land had been a roofing and plumbing company way back when. This became obvious as the pile of debris – tires, piping, shingles, nails – started to build up.

Noel did the tilling for the whole space. We measured it as just under a quarter acre, and the whole process of tilling took several days.

Next came another few days of actually forming the raised beds. We built three-foot wide beds, forty-five feet long.

We ended up with seven rows, but only really used five. For the garden, I grew about a hundred tomato plants and sunflowers as well as several dozen summer squash plants. Basil plants were scattered among the rows. The goal was to make this a market garden and sell the produce at the recently opened downtown farmers market.

After everything was planted, we realized that water was going to be a major problem. Every other night at my house, Noel and I would fill a couple of 55 gallon drums with water and drive them over to the garden. From there we would fill watering cans and try to saturate each plant by hand. The whole process took several hours.

From hand watering, we moved to drip tape attached to upright barrels. We would still haul water to the site, but instead of using watering cans we would use a hand pump to transfer the water to the barrels and turn on a spigot. The water pressure was not enough to get water all the way down the row, so it was largely ineffective.

I’m not sure how much produce came out of the garden since I was absent for most of its productive time. The lack of steady water supplies led us to the conclusion that this project wasn’t going to work. So, after one season we moved on. I ripped out all the plants in late August when I was back in town, cleaned up the site as best I could, hauled off the barrels, pots, twine, stakes, drip tape, buckets and whatever else we had there and called it a day.

The land is flat again, and to my knowledge it hasn’t been used as a garden space since. We did learn some new skills and figured out how to do our best when the situation was never going to be optimal or even very manageable in the long term. We also came up with the name Circle Acres here and considered Fowler to be its first incarnation.