growth Personal
One woman’s ‘grand experiment’ to raise a vegetable garden during a pandemic
Story by Kevin Hecteman • Photos by Manny Crisostomo
A pandemic descends on your hometown, and your employer sends you to work from home, which happens to have a ginormous yard.
You have no idea how long this will last. What now? If you’re Sondra Ames-Hauger, you get to planting.
“I knew that with the pandemic, it was going to be really difficult to go anywhere, and that we really should try to stay home as much as possible,” said Ames-Hauger, who works for a school district in the Sacramento area. “I thought it was a perfect opportunity to start my garden in the backyard, because I knew I would have a lot of extra time after working from home.” From that seed sprang forth a summerlong bounty: zucchini, cucumbers, carrots, basil, pumpkins, tomatoes—plus trial, error and lessons learned for 2021. “I called this my grand experiment,” Ames-Hauger said, “because I’d really never done a garden like this. I planted things here and there, but I’ve never done a vegetable garden that I tended to in the way that I did this, and I can see why so many people do this. There’s something
really soul-fulfilling about growing a garden.” And it all started with a fence in need of repair.
Getting started Ames-Hauger lives on a third of an acre in Carmichael with her husband, Chris Hauger, also an educator; daughter Madison, 16; and son Riley, 14. Last spring, while helping replace a fence on their property’s boundary, the idea came to her.
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Sondra Ames-Hauger started growing vegetables last spring when the pandemic sent her home to work. She continues to garden with, clockwise from top left, daughter Madison, son Riley and husband Chris Hauger.
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