If you’re going to be reading our thoughts on gardening, you might want to know our credentials.  We have ONE.  We’ll show it to you.

When it was first built in 1928, our neighborhood was one of the first “suburbs” of Winston Salem.  Any further out was farmland.  Today, we are  considered “in town” and that is one of the many reasons for the popularity of our neighborhood.  It doesn’t hurt that the neighborhood is a historic district and has sidewalks,  many charming bungalows and the occasional cottage garden.

Typically suburban in size, the lot measures 60′ x 150′.  As you can see from the photo, the house, carport, driveway and sidewalk take up about half of the 9750 sq ft.   And we’re fairly close to our neighbors.  And we love it. We can walk for miles and stay on sidewalks, on Sunday mornings we can ride our bikes to downtown and back or to Salem Lake, which is about a 7 mile ride.  We sit on our front porch in the evening and say hello to the passing parade of local residents (many of whom we’ve gotten to know just by sitting on our porch or working in the garden).  We love our neighborhood.

When we bought the house it was also typical of an old house in that it had been remuddled several times.  It had no insulation, the ancient single pane windows rattled and allowed for nice breezes to flow (even when they windows were closed!),  each room had only one electrical outlet and there were two closets for the entire house.  Still…. a great house.

And the yard.  Oh, boy… the yard.   The yard was a fairly steep hill in back and the small front yard had two large old trees which kept anything from growing (by keeping out sunlight and by sucking up all available water) and which died of old age very soon after we moved in.

The first (and biggest) problem was that it was hard as a rock.  Literally.  The first time we used a roto tiller in the front yard, the tiller bounced.  The blades couldn’t get into the soil, so the tiller just bounced up and down.  What I thought was going to take a few hours of work (look at it!  It’s a small front yard!), took three days.  Three very long hard days.  It was the beginning of what has come to be a continual drive to amend the soil.

The soil here is often clay, and believe me when I tell you that clay can really get compacted.  Sitting for year after year, never being dug (only grass since 1928), and with the hot southern sun acting like an oven, it became one big brick.  And we had to do something about that.  But right now we’re going to save soil amendment for another blog.  Let’s continue our tour of the garden.  Next Post:  the major transformation:  the back yard – then and now.

Filed under: Our Garden