Garden Gear

Gardening is a passion of mine, I am even more passionate about organic gardening. I owe it all to Alma my gardening angel. She taught me how to communicate with plants and all the good beings in my garden to help it grow.

I am not fortunate to own the land I work and being a renter I am very limited. After 10 years of tending to the existing landscape I decided to restart my organic vegetable and flower garden so I removed the lawn and started digging. In the spring of 2005, to my horror, what I thought was an organic garden " work in progress " was drenched with an over spray of fungicide by a neighbors tree service employee. My starter plants were placed on my work table in the center of the garden to be acclimated to the weather when the spray came pounding down to earth. I immediately moved the tender seedlings to the covered patio and started hosing down everything in site. The smell was terrible and I was in tears, I no longer had an organic yard. Mother nature stepped in and the next four days it rained which in turn helped to dilute the toxins on the property.

In the process of working out a claim with the company I requested a soil test to see what amount of fungicide, if any, was in my well loved soil. To my surprise, there was not enough fungicide to be detected in the soil sample although the now deceased seedlings had very high, measurable levels. I also found, through the soil test, that the dirt also contained " under acceptable levels " of DDT, DDE, and DDD. So much for my organic gardening.

I continued to work through two seasons of spring/summer gardening and then decided, since my heart was no longer in it, return the area back to a lawn so my dogs can enjoy playing in the backyard again.

I still live and garden organically but have limited my growing to non-toxic, animal and bird friendly varieties of herbs and flowers. My hope for this page will be to offer my artwork for the great outdoors. This will include hummingbird chairs, wind socks, birdhouses, painted rocks, spider huts and more.