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        As you walk into the gated garden plot, you are first struck by the sheer size of it. Over seven hundred square feet of pure heaven on earth, filled with a large variety of heirloom vegetables. The next thing that strikes you is all the color that is spread all over, from pink to purple, red to brown, yellow to orange and all the other colors of the rainbow. The immense variety is mind blowing, over sixty different varieties of vegetables. Every kind of vegetable you can think of is planted here; tomatoes, cabbage, carrots, numerous greens, melons, and of course peppers, just to name a couple. The peppers being my babies have the most room in the garden, a four foot by thirty foot raised row that I have packed with plants.

The soil is ripe with organic matter and squirming with all sorts of life forms. The pepper plants bask in the sun till dawn, as the plot has nothing blocking the sun at all. The plants get a south blowing wind making the stems thick and strong, they look like tree trunks because of this. The green branches reach for the sky, heavy with pepper pods. There is one oddity in the row, the Cheiro Roxo pepper plant, which has amazing black foliage (leafs). The plants are spaced one foot apart so they touch some, but this is planned. There is an old wise tale that pepper plants like to hold hands, hands meaning leaves.  There are thirty one plants packed in this part of the garden, with mostly sweet peppers. The good stuff is in the garden in back of the house, where I keep my arsenal of heat.

You step out the back door of the garage and see a field of green and white. It has three four foot by eight foot raised beds, and twenty three five gallon pots. The pots are home made out of old pickle buckets, and are white with a handle. I drilled holes all along the bottom of the bucket for drainage, so the plants would not drown. I made my own potting mix to fill them with made of compost; peat moss, perlite, lime, and my own blended organic fertilizer mix.  All the pots are filled with hot pepper plants, and the other raised beds have various other vegetables such as bok choy, orka, broccil, and beets. All the pots and raised beds in the back rest on a wood chip bed, to help keep out weeds. The raised beds are made out of a brown wood, and are one foot tall. They are filled with a mix of compost, peat moss, grass clippings, and fruit and vegetable waste.  It really is a sea of fire in the gardens, and I could spend days swimming in it.  The joy you get from a simple plant will always amaze me, but it’s the simple things that really count. So dawn has come and the sun is setting, the plants are going down for the night. It is such a peaceful calm in the garden at this time, with the crickets chirping and the fireflies dancing in the sky. I love this place, such a simple thing, a garden.