Keyhole Garden

The other day I was emailing back and forth with a blog reader and she mentioned keyhole gardening. I had read about them earlier and thought it sounded interesting but it was something I would need Vince’s help with and I’m so sure that if I mention one more thing I want him to do, he’s going to run away from home. After talking with my friend, I kept thinking about it. There are advantages to doing keyhole gardening. According to the experts, they do much better than traditional gardens in drought (always!) situations; surely the grass burrs wouldn’t be growing all the way on top of the keyhole setup; they’re much easier than bending and stooping and other reasons but those were the ones that appealed to me.

One day I decided to mention it to Vince. I was surprised that he thought it would be a good idea. Any time I say . . I was thinking . . he cringes because some of my ideas are either very labor intensive or very costly. He found some youtube videos and we watched them and he was all for the idea.

We’re going to use pallets for the “walls” and he brought home a load of cardboard yesterday.

He pulled all the tape off the cardboard and took them to the spot in the garden where we’re going to build the first one.

It looks like a lot of cardboard but Vince said we’ll need at least one, maybe two, more truckloads. But, that’s in the little truck. Oh, how I wish we had a full size truck but I’m not bringing that up. I suppose that will wait til we move and have a garage too.

That is a pile of rabbit poop that we’ve been saving for when we build the keyhole garden. Really, it’s just some we didn’t use in the regular garden. Our friends’ rabbits are really productive when it comes to supplying rabbit poop. I told Vince we need to go back to their place and get more cow poop too. It will be fine to put in the lower layers of the filling material. Poor Vince. I asked him one day if he ever thought he’d be out roaming over our friends’ 600 acres picking up dried cow poop. He started to say something and then didn’t. I’m not sure what he was thinking and I probably don’t want to know because you can bet if I hadn’t come along, he would have gone his entire life without shoveling cow poop. But, he also would probably have gone his entire life without a fresh picked artichoke, snow peas, okra, anasazi beans and lots of other things . . crawfish! Yes! Crawfish .. he had never had crawfish before I came along.

Hopefully by this weekend we’ll get started on the keyhole garden.