Window Boxes

                           

 Our acre is mostly sand, gravel and the old stone fortress. When we moved here the field stone pile they must have worked out of was still handy on the north side of the house piled where I envisioned thick green grass.
Thick green grass is a pipe dream around here. So is a productive garden. Unless you haul in something that will compost.  I like flowers, green grass, vegetable gardens, shrubbery, fruit trees,  berry patches, anything that grows something green on a stem. So we hauled.
We hauled in old hay, cow manure, rabbit manure, the fall leaves, cardboard, you name it, we put it on the garden for composting.
The first few years the weeds didn't even grow in the portion of our sandy patch that I had designated as the garden. Oh my, you know you're in trouble if the garden won't even grow weeds.
I have not complained about weeds ever since. So my first valuable lesson in gardening is: If you have weeds you can grow vegetables.
Living on a sand pile in the heat of summer is depressing and sandy. Sand came in on the shoes. I couldn't keep it out. We had no grass to speak of and the lane came right to the door. No grass, no shrubbery, and a very abbreviated sidewalk. Concrete steps, also constantly sandy and dirty. What a mess. I longed for a shady front yard, green grass and shrubbery.
I envisioned a patio lined with flowerpots spilling over with ivy and geranium. Outdoor furniture and fountains and a firepit. Why not order up a pergola while I'm at it. That all I wanted all summer, every summer. A cool, shady, comfortable, private place.
It's been almost thirty years now.  The garden grows flowers and vegetables. Not your heavily loaded vegetables on dark green leafed out bushes. And no root crops unless you want to wait until Thanksgiving to harvest them. But still, as long as we feed the soil with organic trash of some sort, we can grow tomatoes and cukes and green beans. And flowers.
 So window boxes was a perk I had only sort of half wished for. You can't very well imagine growing greenery virtually ON the stone fortress if you can't even get grass to grow at its feet, now can you? This summer we are growing green grass and flower boxes full of ivy and geranium. This is probably one of the most satisfying gardening projects we have tried to date. It's amazing what you can do with potting soil, Miracle Grow, and a few bedding plants. We have to water them a lot ( every week whether it rains or not and sometimes more).
We now have a shady front lawn, plenty of sidewalk up against which grows green grass and shady coolness outside our front door. On the patio is an outdoor cushioned love seat that Elv built for me. Dreams fulfilled plus. God is good.