“We’ve been in our house for four years, and we haven’t really done anything with the backyard,” Ames-Hauger said. “And I thought, ‘You know, it’d be really nice to have a garden back here.’” Being new at gardening, Ames-Hauger went online and scooped up all the information she could find. She also found planter boxes online, buying shipping crates for beehives; these were about 4 feet square by 1 foot deep.
“We did rows of carrots, which were pretty fun,” Ames- Hauger said. “The pumpkin seedlings and watermelon went into the ground end of May. We did onions as well.” Learning on the job What she ended up harvesting was a mixed bag. Pumpkins did well, she said, and made for fine Halloween decorations. Watermelons did not fare as well: “I couldn’t ever get them to be bigger than the size of a golf ball before they would die.” Ames-Hauger and her family were learning as they went, “understanding that planting the stuff starts to attract things that you really have never seen in your garden.” Case in point: the beautiful white butterfly—called a cabbage white—that she noticed flitting about her garden. Little did she know it was a bringer of doom to some of her plants. “While I thought it was just a lovely little visitor, I found out that she was laying like 400 eggs every time she was in my garden,” leading to “little cabbage worms that eat everything,” Ames-Hauger said. Those voracious worms made short work of her cabbage crop. Her zucchini fared better—she put half a dozen plants in
“Once I knew that I was going to have a garden, I kind of got a little bit of the cart before the horse and went and bought a whole bunch of seeds,” she said, and “just thought, ‘You know, what do I want to grow? What would I love to try to grow?’ And seeds aren’t very expensive, so it was a good way to start.” So she planted, as she put it, “a little bit of everything.” At the outset, in April, that meant zucchini, bell peppers, carrots, bush beans, cabbage and caulif lower. She also planted artichokes and several kinds of tomatoes. Pumpkins and cucumbers followed.
The couple’s nephew and niece, Reece and Ayla Johnson, help every chance they get. Painted rocks label crops in the garden.
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March/April 2021
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