As one of my many distractions from real life, gardening has taken over quite a bit of my time. The Big Garden is set up to be overkill by design.  If run well it will always over produce.  If run poorly it will meet my minimums quite easily.  That concept has been hard for me to keep in mind when I work on things.  It seems like such a tragedy if something fails in the garden.  Essentially though it just means that the time I spent working on the garden is going toward learning as opposed to production.

So anyhow.. yeah. I’ve written a bunch about it already so here it goes from the beginning.  Spring 2004 I started working full time and I started looking for a house to buy.  As it turned out I was able to find a place that a friend was selling.

Enter the garden:

I didn’t realize it until just now but the first post of the HomeWork page was about the garden.  It was 20’x40′.  mostly contained by the standard 36″ green welded wire fencing. That day it went from all weeds to being relatively clear. Three days later it was time to cut down some trees in the yard.  And here’s what happened. (full post from HomeWork)

Lindy showed up and quickly got to work in the garden. Skippy mentioned that it would be a great place to burn all the stuff I tore out.. and thus, we decided that we would. Ok, so we got our pile, and decided that some kerosene would help out. Todd said he had some in the blue can in the shed. So we got that. what we didn’t know, was that Dave was pouring on fuel from the OTHER blue can. While it was marked kerosene, it was in fact gasoline.

Needless to say, there was a huge boom and a big ring of fire as I saw the garden explode in flames with us in it (not an exaggeration). The poof died out quickly.. but not before Dave, the lighter of the fire, dove over the fence and rolled in the grass to get the fire off of him. Ahem.. I can not impress enough on how freaked out we all were and how glad we were that Dave escaped with only minor beard, arm hair, and eyebrow removal as well as some bent glasses.After the sun and our heart rates went down, Dave and Skippy went off to a more controlled BBQ while the rest of us enjoyed a big pile of pizza from Backstreets. I plan to give some serious thought on dedicating the garden to Dave’s lost eyebrow hair.

And the rest is history.  Which of course I will tell you about in future posts.

By the way you can jump right to present day garden updates by going to my channel on YouTube