Before + After: Food in the Foothills

Last week, I had the honor of planting with a client whose garden has come such a long way since our first meeting. Along with her daughter, her mother and her friend, we pruned back her spring plants and transplanted her summer tomatoes (more than 10 of them!), along with plenty of peppers and other warm-season plants. While we worked, we talked about how the garden has been growing, and her husband came out to harvest salad greens for dinner. I felt so lucky to get to watch her garden dreams play out right in front of me. It reminded me of the first interaction we had.

I met Anne around the holidays when I participated in a pop-up at Roots Zero Waste Market. She saw me on their Instagram and sent me an email that I still remember opening.

From her email, I could tell she was excited to garden, but she had experienced some setbacks that I immediately related to. Her house was newly built, so the soil around it had been disturbed and dismantled. She had planted tomatoes the year before and they experienced an infestation of white flies. Her home was surrounded by a herd of deer who were curious and emboldened by previous experiences with people.

These issues were enough to shake anyone’s confidence, but I was sure that Anne’s challenges were not her fault in any way. They were problems in her setup, and these could certainly be fixed. I was inspired by Anne’s enthusiasm and determination to get it right. She had the persistence of a gardener (something that’s hard to teach); she wanted to plant again.

Setup problems are the things I see the most in the gardens I visit. They also happen to be the thing I feel most suited to fix. When I first met Anne, we talked about her goals for the garden and walked around around her property. She wanted to feed her family from the space and protect it from the deer, so we needed an area that was rather large. The spaces where she gardened the year before were too exposed to the deer and too shaded.

After some discussion on the garden size, we chose an area in the hillside that had plenty of sun and space for protection. For the installation, I partnered with Sean at Owyhee Landscape. His knowledge of the materials we were using and the way he visualized the unconventional space opened up so many possibilities. Once it was warm enough to dig into the sandy soil, we got right to work.

This garden had so many elements to it, from the deer fence to the fire-wise Corten steel beds we filled with a “stone slinger” that shot the high quality soil in an arc from the street to the raised beds. We added irrigation, sandstone steps and made adjustments to the deer fence. Finally, we planted seeds and transplants in late March, crossing our fingers that the deer did not get in.

This season, the garden has grown in beautifully. With fresh, nutrient-dense soil, high quality plants and a deer fence that has worked so far, Anne is well on her way to a productive, protected space. When I’m in Anne’s area, I swing around her cul-de-sac to see how high the plants have grown.

Last week, we were planting and she told me how much joy she gets from feeding people from her garden. I can still see the look on her face as she said it. I’m someone who shows love through the food I prepare, and the energy I put into gardening takes that another step further. Gardeners grow food for themselves, but also for their neighbors, family and friends.

I knew that productivity was Anne’s goal in the garden from the outset, and it’s probably the most common goal I hear about. Productivity can mean different things to different people but watching Anne use the abundance from her garden to feed her community left me feeling so grateful to have played a part in that.