Making the Most out of your Resources (Space, Materials, and Ingenuity!)
Early this spring I was amazed and impressed after a visit to Dennis and Karen Hogan’s house in Ocean Shores. Their many clever innovations to optimize their gardening experience while reducing their workload were inspirational. Whether you have a large or small yard, or perhaps do your gardening on a deck, you are bound to find many creative ideas from the Hogans’ home garden.
Upon walking up to their backyard, I noticed a fenced-in area next to the house, a 10’ x 12’ greenhouse, a separate fenced area with raised garden beds, and a huge compost tumbler. All four of these have their own story worth telling! Read on as I share the highlights of this amazing garden.
We will start this virtual tour with the fenced area next to the house. It provides them easy access from the house, its southern exposure gets plenty of sun, and nearly every space is filled with containers of every shape and size. Karen uses pots, planter boxes, old washtubs, and wheelbarrows to grow both annual and perennial veggies, herbs, and flowers. And she has made sure that there is enough room to walk around everything for planting and harvesting. There is even a volunteer Red Granny Smith apple tree in the middle of this garden! It just started growing there back in 2005.
The five-foot fence keeps the deer out so all her plants are safe from their nibbling. Normally deer can jump a five-foot fence, but they stay away because there is no reasonable place for them to land inside the garden.
To make Karen’s gardening life a bit easier, everything is watered by automatic drip irrigation (designed and installed by Karen and Dennis), and the ground and containers are all mulched to manage the weeds and keep the plants hydrated by reducing evaporation. Karen tells me if she was to do it over again, she would have chosen tire mulch for the ground instead of wood mulch that breaks down faster.
We move on to the greenhouse which also does a great job of using limited space wisely, including vertical spaces. Of note, these pictures were taken in April and three months later, most of these plants have grown 12-24”, some even more.
The south side of the greenhouse is protected by 40% shade cloth…an important addition to prevent the greenhouse from overheating and burning the plants. All plants are watered via drip irrigation on timers, and there are two large fans that provide air circulation (also on timers).
Dennis’ relatively new hobby is his hydroponic garden. He has blue buckets filled with clay pebbles and a couple small tomato starts. On the bottom of each bucket is nutrient-rich water that is circulated along with oxygen by a specialized pump giving the plants the optimum amount of each.
Dennis plants the larger indeterminate tomato plants in the back row and the smaller determinate ones in front. Hydroponics is a worthy effort for those interested in trying it. If done properly, plants can grow approximately 20% faster and yield 25% more than those grown in soil. When adding the extra warmth from the greenhouse, these numbers are likely much higher. Dennis’ tomato plants, three months later, are now roughly 4 to 5 feet tall. On top of all his other automation tricks, he uses an old electric toothbrush to gently hand pollinate his tomato plants!
The other hydroponic project Dennis has going uses a large PVC pipe to hold net pots containing a variety of pepper plants. Again, a pump will circulate nutrients and water through the pipe to the individual plants on a timed schedule.
Many of us that try to garden here on the coast know how challenging it is to grow warm season crops like peppers and tomatoes. Using a greenhouse to keep them warm is a great option.
Just a few feet south of the greenhouse is the newest addition to the Hogans’ garden. Within this fenced area Karen has added several raised beds using the Hügelkultur method to fill them. This method utilizes compostable materials from the yard on the bottom with garden soil on top. She also has a “carbon” garden bed, also known as a “lasagna” garden. Similar to the Hügelkultur bed, this technique layers different organic material over the natural soil and allows it to decompose creating a nutrient rich loamy soil for plants without tilling.
The Hogans ran a separate water line to this garden for ease of watering, and the entire area is covered with mulch to control the weeds. I am anxious to see how this area develops over the year as Karen has plans for numerous additions!
Finally, their compost tumbler is certainly one-of-a-kind. There are two bins in this oversized 3’x 6’ tumbler so the Hogans can use the finished compost on one side while they start a new batch on the other side. It sits high enough above the ground so a wheelbarrow can fit underneath for ease of removing the finished compost. But what makes this tumbler truly remarkable is that Dennis hooked up a motor that automatically rotates it…and the motor has its own remote control.
Thank you for taking this tour through Dennis and Karen’s garden. If you are ever able to see it in person, I am sure you will notice many more innovations I have not mentioned. There is so much to see and learn here!
Warm blessings as you enjoy your own gardens this year.
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