Avant Gardener: Location is important when planting a garden

  • By Kyle Valentini
  • December 11, 2012
  • 357
                        
Summary: What seemed like the perfect garden location has resulted in disappointment. The perfect vegetable and herb garden is located in a flat area that gets plenty of sun, is easily fenced to keep out the critters and is quiet enough that the gardener can still hear the buzzing of the bees and the friendly hey, sweetie song of the black-capped chickadee. My garden is not such a place. My garden is located next to a former trucking company that specialized in the hauling of hazardous waste. It is currently leased by a towing company that makes a habit of keeping junk cars and trucks in plain sight for weeks at a time. It is however flat and gets almost enough sun. For reasons that are unclear to me the former hazardous waste hauling trucks still make a daily appearance in the early morning hours between three and four where they sit idling until 5:30 or six a.m. Periodically throughout the day more trucks appear and for whatever reason are kept idling. There is a six foot cedar fence that partially blocks the former hazardous waste hauler slash current towing company but it is not nearly enough. The fence is charming enough as it has grayed over the years. I can remember a nice young man skilled with a post-hole digger, sweating shirtless in the early part of spring as he installed the eight foot lengths of fencing that would make this the ideal place for a garden. The same piece of land served a very different purpose to the family that had previously used it as a makeshift home car repair business. The first official turning of the soil unearthed spark plugs and various other automotive accessories like shock absorbers and fittings. What was I thinking turning the weed riddled plot into a garden? The soil was probably contaminated with chemicals with long, complicated names. I found plenty of the old pull-style tabs from cans that probably once held spirituous carbonated beverages. Raised beds would be my solution to the Ohio clay soil that was questionable. It worked too. The first few years of the raised bed garden were good. The tomatoes flourished, even the hard-to-grow heirloom varieties that look nothing like the flavorless pink-fleshed examples in the produce section of the local grocery stores grew plump and heavy on sturdy plants. Peppers, broccoli, potatoes and a variety of greens and lettuces with names like butter crunch poked their first promising sprouts through the custom-blended soil that was part Canadian peat, part backyard compost and part something else. Fragrant herbs, garlic, vining gourds and decorative sunflowers and amaranth thrived in the backyard garden. Haphazardly installed gutter and a downspout I got for free from a neighbor on the barn made water collection easy and it only took one or two good rains to fill up a 55 gallon barrel that virtually eliminated the need to water from the hose. Perfect. It all seemed perfect. But I am pondering moving the garden. The former hazardous waste hauling trucks keep coming and idling and making my garden stink. Plants are supposed to clean the air and I imagine they do but the act of tending and caring for them while the stench of diesel lingers heavy in the air is making the perfect garden not so perfect. What was I thinking when I decided to put a garden in there?


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