Developing the garden over the last 5 years has been a lot of hard work - but truly enjoyable. When we bought the property, there were some good 'bones' immediately surrounding the house, but very little elsewhere. Each year we've worked on different parts of the garden, reclaiming some areas from thickets of Blackberry, others from overgrown Salal and Salmonberry.
The soils here are basically glacial tilth - which tends to mean extremely sandy with a hard-pan not far beneath. I have to use vast quantities of compost, wood-chips, manure - one good thing is that quite a few of my neighbors have horses - so lots of good by-products
An advantage of Bainbridge Island is that we can pretty well work in the garden year round. It generally doesn't get too cold in winter - just very damp. We do have a problem in the Summer, in that it's very dry - essentially no rain from late June to the end of September. This means an irrigation system is quite important.
Most of my time right now is to get my catalog of plants up to date - I've still got a lot of data entry to do, but getting closer.
A final point, having been in the States since 1981, I now use American spelling!
John
