by Annemarie Aldorasi-Derenard

Created on: February 19, 2009   Last Updated: March 01, 2009

So I asked my husband to help me build a garden. The back end of the horse corral would be a perfect spot. Now, keep in mind, for your own visual journey through this, we do not ever take on anything small. We are big visionaries and map out an experience from beginning to end. Maybe perfectionist would define us a little better.

Anyway we spent one week researching, reading and looking at pictures of all kinds of gardens that came before ours. How to prepare the dirt, raised or furrowed beds, how to get the water to out precious produce, how to protect the seed or tiny transplants from the birds and the sun. How, what and where to fertilize our produce. We worked very hard on this project. The final step of our process was to draw out our garden and decide what we would plant.

We needed two days to prepare the ground. The area was approximately 8x20. We dug and turned the beautiful earth in the unused portion of our horse corral. Which was the whole back end of our .38 acre of property. On half of this piece of land lived a beautiful Mustang Palomino Mare named Blondie. She belonged to my father and he rode her every day until he was 75 years old. She watched us, (wide eyed, ears perked with interest), toil in the dirt in part of what was her space for those two days. She was not happy with us at all for putting up the fence to keep her from the area we were working in and in the future to keep her from becoming fat on our hard work.

We decided after much debate, which for us is the only way to make a decision, to use an under ground water system. We ran hard line, PVC pipe, from our water source than down one main furrow the length of the garden area. From the hard line we ran a soak-er hose at a 15 inch depth in each planting furrow. Setting and connecting these lines did not take much time. Then we built up our mounds for our plants and seeds to be planted in. Day one complete.

The place we lived at this time was in Southern California, in a rural horse community. Our property was originally part of a Chicken Ranch, many years before we lived there and may I add here a famous Chicken Ranch, please don't judge the area or us by the portrayal of the area in a recent movie.

On the second day of our project we laid newspaper in between each planting mound. On top of the paper we put a light wood based animal bedding. We wanted to do what we could naturally to deter the growth in these spaces of weeds. I'll say here by placing our watering system as we did we

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