Growing Gorgeous Garlic
Heirloom Gardens
Beds of Wildflowers

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     Welcome . . . to the first issue of Homegrown. We hope you enjoy it.

     Way back when I took up gardening, I became an organic gardener by default. I was too scared after reading the labels on garden chemicals to actually buy and use any of them.

     Ten years ago, however, I actually saw how sensible gardening can change the world. We moved to the country, into an old house where no gardener had ever lived.

     About a week after moving into the house, I realized that something was very weird. Here we were living in the country - and there were no birds. No twittering woke us up in the morning. No singing accompanied our daytime strolls. There were no bunnies, no squirrels (even though there were a couple of old native pecan trees), and no butterflies. The only wildlife we saw were roaches, fleas, mice and some rattlesnakes.

     The house was old and needed work, so we started there. In renovating kitchen and bathrooms, we put diatomaceous earth in the walls and under the floors. We used a product that combined DE with orange oil in the bottom of cabinets and pantries.

     I've always been an enthusiastic but lazy gardener (my favorite parts are picking flowers and eating tomatoes), so when I started to build garden beds, I used the sheet mulching method that required little or no digging and relied on Mother Nature to do all the real work.

     We planted fruit trees (peaches and plums). We planted old roses and iris from my mother's garden. We planted lots of flowers and vegetables and shrubs. Some of them lived; some of them didn't. We experimented to see what worked.

     And we didn't use any chemicals. We used horse manure and leaves. We used fish emulsion and seaweed. We used some organic fertilizers and bacillus thuringensis when the caterpillars got out of hand. That's it.

     And in a year's time we had birds. We had barn swallows raising their young on the two front porches, twittering their little hearts out from dawn to dusk. We had cardinals browsing in the horse pen and the big hackberry tree. We had mockingbirds, hummingbirds, and lots of other birds I don't know by name. We had butterflies all over the butterfly weed and butterfly bush as well as the zinnias, coneflowers, and pentas. We had squirrels stealing pecans and giving the dogs someone to chase. The bunnies hopped in and out.

     This little two-acre world was changed dramatically and wonderfully by simply planting some plants, helping the soil come back to life and letting nature seek its own balance.

     We have a lot of praying mantis, ladybugs, lacewings, and dragon flies, as well as other predatory insects that keep the pests in check. We didn't buy any of those, but we do thank the pecan growers down the road for their purchase of a lot of ladybugs that moved into our attic for winter protection then stuck around to eat our aphids. We have some friendly snakes that mostly keep the mice under control. We even got rid of the roaches!

     The armadillo is a real pain in the garden, but this is not, after all, the Garden of Eden.

     What is the point of all this? The point is that I was amazed at the transformation that I saw here in my own back yard. It was a stunning example of how gardening without chemicals, with native and well-adapted plants, and with a forgiving nature really works. Every year it gets better. Even in this awful summer, we had a decent vegetable garden, peaches and blackberries and flowers blooming all summer long. (The water bill was a tad high.)

     And I want you all to know how wonderful it is not to have to worry about dangerous chemicals around you and the kids and the pets. I want you too to have the fun of picking ripe tomatoes off the vine and eating them while they're warm from the sun, the juice dribbling down your chin just a little. I want you to put a little comfrey on your skinned knee, a little mint in your tea, and a little rosemary in the bathtub.

     I want everyone to enjoy gardening again - not just mow the lawn because you have to keep the neighbors happy. Gardening is fun. In Texas, it is fun almost twelve months of the year. We can grow veggies, herbs, flowers, trees, shrubs, and grasses that are the envy of the rest of the country.

     Texas gardeners are lucky to have so many choices - I hope this magazine points out a lot of them. So, let me know what you like and don't like, what you'd like to see more of, what you are interested in and tired of.

     Please patronize our distributors and advertisers and help them continue to supply organic products and good plants and information to all of us. Seek out organic growers at farmer's markets and organic produce at the grocery store. We're all in this together, and together we can make Texas a cleaner, happier, and more beautiful place to live and grow and garden.