A Little Introduction

I wanted to name this blog "The Black Thumb Gardener," or something along that nature. But that blog name was already taken.

My past experience with plants has been dismal, to say the least. I killed a cactus once by underwatering it. My house has no plants in it, partly because of me and partly because my cats would eat them. The only plant I ever managed to keep alive was a schefflera. I don't know how it survived, frankly, because I only remembered to water it when it was starting to droop. I was able to keep the cats out of it, but my daughter (four years old at the time) pulled the leaves off.

I should also add that I hate insects and getting my hands dirty.

I live in the Jemez mountains of New Mexico. Land that comes with a house is small and expensive. A typical plot is a fraction of an acre. When my husband and I bought our current house, a townhouse connected to our neighbors on both sides, the side yard had two stone wall terraces and some flowering plants. The back yard is a steep hill that leads to a small canyon. There was a rough stone-outlined "garden" with some more flowering plants, and small lawn above that next to the house. It was not pretty, but I thought oh, boy, I can do whatever I want with this yard!

Well, you can imagine. For the first two years (and I have an excuse - I was pregnant the first summer and had a baby the second summer), the yards did nothing but gather weeds. I'd go out and pull them now and then, but they kept coming back. The following year, when the weeds were so bad we had an infestation of grasshoppers, I decided I'd had enough. In future posts I will show what I did with the side yard to make it respectable and completely weed-free. And now that I've decided what to do with the back yard, I wanted to start this blog to document my progress and to show that even for the non-gardener, a decent garden is possible.