Poppie's beloved garden... his haven, his retreat and his pride.

It is funny what a roll of fencing can bring to a man. This year we got to fence the garden so that the kids don't walk over from Mokie's across it and that goats can not get into it. The garden has a wall so to speak...  Years ago we had an area of the property that was quite well suit, space wise, for a garden.  Sadly we had stripped the topsoil off of it to make our old yard better, we no longer own the yard as that is where Mokie and family now live.  The piece of property had always been such a hill that it was not really good to begin with so we had used the top soil to make a nicer yard.  We also had a lot of excess tires at the time, the left overs from our junk  yard and the crushing of over 157 cars we had collected for the purpose.  So what does one do with well over 200 tires, thank the Lord not all of them had come to use with four wheels.  Well necessity is the mother of invention, don't you know. By shear coincidence, if you believe in them which I don't,  the neighbors were digging a section out of a hill in their yard for a shop, they had lots of dirt to get rid of and we had a space that with dirt and a tire wall we could make into a garden.  God does so provide.  The neighbors brought the dirt over and I built a dirt wall around the dirt.  Poppie and our tiny little Yogie in his lap, used his little garden tractor with a push blade on the front to smooth all the dirt down behind the tire wall and eventually it become a huge raised garden.  What an accomplishment it was and such a source of accomplishment for the three of us,  Booboo was an infant so didn't help out much.  The last layer of dirt was a couple of loads of cow manure, also provided by our wonderful neighbors.  The garden of our dreams became a reality.  It had weeds a plenty the first year, a short growing season as it got planted late due to the building of it.  I planted strawberries in every one of the 200 plus tires and we had the best crop of strawberries for the next few years.  A five gallon bucket every few days during the producing season, thank goodness they were just June bearing berries. 

As with all thing time passes and the wear and tear comes.  We expanded the garden back to the fence doubling it's size to where it is about 3/16 ths of an acre.  We didn't have any manure over the years and it grew less and less fruitfully.  The strawberries after about 5 years no longer bore fruit as we had to allow the tires to become the wall it was designed to be and the dirt became to hard for them to thrive.  The wild grass grew in and was hard to manage or mow.  The top row had been planted with a iris in everyone, a beautiful show of color each spring, but irises they do grow and eventually filled each tire and became root bound.  Sadly over the last two years, the garden produced so little as to be not worth the work to take care of it.  Poppie built a green house in the back corner and put in raised beds so we did get a great crop of tomatoes and peppers but most of the other was a bust.  The rain last year and this gave us no incentive to plant and let the seeds rot.   Fortunately God had supplied incentive in the production of manure, in all things praise God.

This is the third full year of having a large herd of goats at our place, and goats make waste, they eat so therefore they expel waste, yes, they poop.  Poppie had used his little tractors to push the waste and the wasted large stalks of hay together,  we no longer use alfalfa as the stocks are not something they like so there is a lot of waste.  We are now trying only to us Timothy hay, as it is as good a food source as alfalfa with not the waste, win win.  Anyway Poppie had three large piles of composted manure and hay waste.  Which had become the greatest soil with energy and food in it.  Poppie heaped it all on to our garden, as it was raining all spring he couldn't plant it so he thought he might as well just dump the compost on it.  A blessing it was.  Poppie tilled it all in and tilled it and tilled it on the days it didn't rain.  The rain didn't stop until June and we thought it was too late to plant but we did it anyway.  The garden almost came up over night, it was for some reason a small utopia.  The seeds were up and making little plants in no time.  Grandpa had extra plants he didn't sell due to the rain and people being hesitant to plant.  Poppie planted all comers.  Shortly Poppie had a wondrous garden.  He spends many an hour pulling weeds, tilling the rows,  our little Yogie has been caught sneaking into the garden and for no apparent reason sitting in her chair pulling weeds, love that girl.  She is an outside girl by nature, has taken on doing all the animal chores and helping with the garden because like Poppie it is a pure joy to her.  She loves to pick huckleberries just like Poppie, though she likes to eat them which Poppie doesn't, I digress. 

PoppiePoppie has a sanctuary to retreat to for the moments he needs, can a garden be a man cave, I wonder.  The fencing keeps the goats from storming his sanctuary and destroying his beloved garden, the blessing to them not being able to enter the garden is that they have groomed the old grass filled garden into a well kept hill, they are so much better than a lawn mower,  they have even eaten a good deal of the old irises, so maybe just maybe I will have a new display of color in the spring at the rim of the garden.  God so had a plan for all the things he made for us, if only we let them come to fruition, just grow a garden and watch it unfold.. tomorrow.