The Year in Review 2008: The garden

I wrote this post about the little bamboo hut in my garden on August 31 on Homeschoolblogger, but it covers so much of the past year in my garden that I thought it would be a great way to start off a post about how my first year of Florida gardening went.


Aug. 31, 2008:

I push my way through a tangle of knee high weeds. Ahead of me, the trees are so enveloped in vines that they look like rolling green hills. An animal rustles the leaves as it scurries from branch to branch, but I can't see what it is. Bugs swarm over a fruit they have pulled from a near-by plant. The heat and humidity are oppressive and sweat has already begun to trickle down my face and into my eyes. I wipe it off with my shirt sleeve and watch a hawk circling over head. There was once a well warn path here, but it is now littered with moss covered branches and dead leaves. I pick up a rotting branch and throw it as far as I can.
Then I reach my goal, the ruins of my once tropical paradise, my retreat from the outside world, my little bamboo garden house.

O.K., that was a bit dramatic, but my little bamboo hut is no longer usable and I figured it needed a good send-off.
So, today's garden update is a eulogy to the garden house, which has gone from being a cute little tiki hut to an over-grown ruin in just a single summer.
We began gardening our plot in the U.F. student gardens back in April.

Even in April it's hot in Florida, so I wanted a shady place in the garden where I could sit. The lab where DH spends a lot of his time is surrounded by bamboo and I was inspired by the palm thatched houses in the books we were reading, as Blaze learned about Mexico and South America during our homeschooling last spring.

DH helped cut the bamboo and we transported the longest pieces by sticking them through the skylight in the car.
Blaze and I did all the building ourselves. It was a great building project for us, because the only expense was the string that we tried it all together with.

We collected palm fronds from the woods to cover the roof and it was almost water tight. There were several quick summer showers, when either Ula or Blaze sat out in the hut with me and waited for the rain to pass.

I added a bamboo table to the hut for Ula's birthday garden party (which was also sort of a birthday party for the hut, because that was when I considered it truly complete).

The vines we planted around the hut, birdhouse gourds, luffa, morning glories, and beans, began climbing up the sides of the house, providing us with more shade and privacy. It became a place where Ula could go to read, and I could go to in the morning, before anyone else was awake, to enjoy a little peace and watch the birds. It also became a conversation piece, as tourists coming to see the bat house in the evenings would stop to talk.

There were even a few times when it was a fun place to hang out at night.

It worked very well as a trellis and we soon had gourds growing and flowers blooming.

It was becoming a bit too popular as a stopping place for tourists and Ula's reading was constantly being interrupted by people wanting to ask questions about the gardens, so she and I started stringing shells to make a curtain that would provide more privacy, but we never finished it.

Then, while we were away on our vacation to Sanibel, a tree fell on the hut causing it to tilt.

I thought that if I could remove the tree, I could probably straighten out the hut again. It had held up amazingly well. But, I didn't have the right tools. I had built the whole hut using nothing but a small hack-saw and that's what I was trying to cut through the tree with. I managed to cut off some of the branches that were in the neighboring garden plot, but I couldn't cut through the trunk.
Then the weather turned bad and for several days I couldn't go out to the garden at all. When I did get out there again, the dead tree had been removed. I should be grateful to the U.F. grounds keepers or whoever removed it, but they stomped down my sesame plants and broke the bamboo house beyond repair.
Blaze cried when I told him it couldn't be fixed. I just feel disappointed and frustrated. I put so much time and work into this and it lasted such a short time.
Another lesson in impermanence.

Yesterday I removed all the chairs from the hut and pulled up the grass mats from the floor. Either today or tomorrow, Blaze and l will arm ourselves with scissors and begin demolition.

Blaze and I turned a small corner of the back of our garden into a "fairy garden"



and Ula showed Blaze how to leave treats for the fairies on Midsummer's Night, passing on a tradition from her own childhood.



The next morning, we had our first flowers in the fairy garden, these lovely pink moss roses, that Blaze said were the fairies saying "thank you".



Blaze also made this stepping stone for our garden:




We learned a lot from our garden this past year. Blaze, who was my helper most of the time, learned how peanuts grow.







I discovered the beauty of okra:



We both learned what sesame seeds look like when they are growing:








We also learned not to give up.
From the ruins of the bamboo house, we built the bean tepee.
From our bug infested, dried out summer garden, we replanted our much more successful, and more comfortable to work in, winter garden.








Looking forward to what this year will bring: