One of the joys of getting a bit older is having the time to putter around in the garden. Another joy is just sitting around the "coffee shop" chatting about gardening and other stuff.

The idea for Senior Gardening came about from frequent postings I made about our garden on my Educators' News web site. I'd originally hoped to create a place where folks could share garden lore via blogs and forums. Software issues and legal concerns blunted that effort. For now, I've organized the site to share my garden blog, a few favorite, time-tested recipes, and some feature articles.

About the Senior Garden

The Senior Garden is located in west central Indiana, just a few miles east of the Wabash River and about twenty-five miles south of I-70. The soil is predominately clay, although just a few miles west and south of us, farmers grow great melons "on the sand!" Our frost dates are about May 1 and October 10.

We're also about two and a half miles northeast of a formation known as Merom Bluff. The bluff rises several hundred feet from the Wabash River and is probably responsible for the area being quite windy. The local lore is that it somehow prevents tornados in the immediate area, although 40-50 MPH straight line winds are not unusual! Fortunately, they're also not an everyday affair. But I often think that this area would be an ideal location for a wind farm.

Probably like many of you, the original senior garden patch was some ground formerly gardened by the previous owners of our property. The ground was pretty well spent, and we've poured soil amendments and organic material into it over the years. The original 16' x 25' section also grew to about 19' x 39'!

As our space needs increased, three additional plots were turned from yard to garden. With our children now grown and with some of the rigors of age, the garden is growing smaller. One plot was reduced in size, deep dug, manured and fertilized, and planted to asparagus.

Another section was just returned to lawn. The original garden patch, somewhat prone to flooding, will be reduced in size this year to make room for a replacement tree. A grand old maple tree that was really too close to the house is dying after too many lightning strikes.

The main Senior Garden is a 16' x 24' raised bed where I do a lot of intensive gardening. We delayed planting a bit in 2008 to put in the first two sides to correct our erosion problem. In March, 2009, the other two sides went in changing the patch from a terrace to a true raised bed.

Note that I'm not yet sure I like this large of a raised bed! I can work the edges about three feet into the garden from all sides, but have to use walking boards in wet weather to prevent soil compaction to access the interior of the bed.

As I write about cutting down our garden area, I should also add that the farmer who rents the fields around us has graciously allowed us to use part of a one acre field east of our home to play with. We'd planned to plant sweet corn in it for 2008, but I had one of those senior things with my arm that required surgery just at planting time. So when the arm was healed, I grabbed some melon and squash plants at the garden store and stuck them in that area.

In March of 2009 in a day of what must have been madness, I turned a 30' x 120' section of that field which has now become our East Garden. We planted sweet corn where the melons grew the previous year and planted the rest of the area to vining crops (squash and melons), some tomatoes we wanted to isolate for seed production, and potatoes.

After having the local raccoon population feast on our melons in 2009, we reconfigured the East Garden for 2010 to keep it a bit further from the woods. It measured 40' x 75'. The raccoons never found our melons, but the deer found our sweet corn and nearly ate it all!

It's nice to have such and area to plant crops that take lots of space.

About the Senior Gardener

I've gardened most of my life. I grew up in the "big city," but as a kid still grew strawberries and sweet corn in a bit of our back yard. When I got out of college and began teaching, I kept a garden in the back yard. Over the years the gardening came inside a bit with plant lights to assist starting transplants and later for growing all sorts of houseplants.

For eight years I owned and operated a 40 acre general purpose farm in southwest, central Indiana. We grew and roadsided lots of sweet corn. We were early adopters of the then new SH₂ super sweet varieties. We also raised hogs, chickens, cattle, and experimented with goats and ducks. We had some incredible gardens on the farm and produced much of our own food.

My wife and I have lived at the senior garden for sixteen years. I "retired" from teaching in 2004 and went to work at a small college for several years before really retiring. During the last ten years of my classroom teaching career, I became heavily involved in technology in education. As with many teachers, I often worked a part-time job, and during some of the teaching years, the job was as a paid writer for various web sites. With the dotcom bust, such positions that paid well pretty much went away, but my interest in web sites continues. In addition to Senior Gardening, I still maintain an educationally related web site. A bit more standard bio appears there.

I've tried to model my garden blog after the book Crockett's Victory Garden by the late James Underwood Crockett, sharing gardening lore by the month. I also have specific features on plants and garden tasks and a few recipes on the site. Although long since out of print, Crockett's Victory Garden, Crockett's Indoor Garden, and Crockett's Flower Garden are still the best reference volumes I have on gardening. Fortunately for others, they're still available used at very reasonable prices through Amazon. Many of the things I write about on Senior Gardening, such as intensive gardening and grass clipping mulch, came from Crockett's books and the old PBS TV show, Crockett's Victory Garden.

I don't limit myself to just Crockett-inspired gardening advice, as there are things I've picked up from years of gardening and the few years we owned a small farm that may be useful to others, such as using a dry sump to dry out wet spots in a yard. I also try to include some of our failures in gardening, as we learn a lot from them. It's really a lot of fun to write. And I find the web site construction and photography a good challenge for my old mind.

With the current national economic crisis, I'd guess lots of folks may be growing "Victory Gardens" this summer. They may be a first garden or just a return to gardening. With that in mind, I try to make my posts not just reflections on what we've done, but somewhat instructive tutorials about various gardening tasks.

One thing I've tried to do on Senior Gardening is to provide larger images where possible of the views shown on this site. Even though many of the images on this page are really pretty big, each one links to an even larger view of the same image. I've often strained to see just what an author is showing from small images on other sites.

You'll also notice that the font sizes used on Senior Gardening are quite large. It you're a senior, you already know why. For younger and better sighted readers, while gardening is truly one of the joys of maturity, small print and mature adult eyes aren't a good match.

Our Host

Senior Gardening is now hosted on Hostmonster.com. We used MacHighway.com for our first fifteen months online, but a server failure there compelled a switch.

Let me add that Senior Gardening is supported entirely from affiliate advertising revenue. I often use embedded advertising links such as the Crockett links above to add to or illustrate content on Senior Gardening. If I lack a picture of an item, say a Troy-Bilt Rear Tine Tiller, I can usually pull one in from Amazon or one of our other affiliate advertisers (list).

We're not paid by the number of impressions (number of times an ad shows) or even by click-throughs on ads. We are paid by folks clicking on an ad on the site and then purchasing something.

What all of this gets around to is that if you appreciate the content on Senior Gardening, why not come back and click through one of our ads the next time you plan to buy something online.

From the at Senior Gardening