Does your property have a garden? If so, do you prefer a lawn or paving slabs, hedges or walls? If not, do you wish it had one?

My property sits on a 6,000-square-feet lot, according to Zillow, and it came with several in-ground garden beds and a quite unruly mass of raspberry canes when I bought it (almost forcibly) in 2017. I wasn’t a gardener back then. I was mostly trying to get through each day without crying. My shell wasn’t as hard as it is now.

2018 was the year I began to dabble in gardening. Being unemployed, I was spending each day at home trying my best to stave off the anxiety and depression. Unfortunately, that often entailed spending whatever little saving I had left. I bought fruit trees, strawberry plants, flowers, and flower bulbs.

There’s an area along the back fence in which I planted strawberries and dahlias in the spring of 2018. I didn’t know much about soil health back then either. Basically, I had zero gardening knowledge. I didn’t know dahlia bulbs cannot survive my winter and must be dug up in October. I didn’t know the soil was basically dirt. It was dry, crumbly, and in no condition to support any sort of life. I was surprised the strawberries survived though I never got to eat any strawberries because it often lacked water and the birds often got to before me.

Fast forward to 2021, that was the year I got serious about gardening. I amended the soil in the area along the back fence with compost, good soil, and plenty of fertilizer. It was also the year when I filled one of the raised beds that was never filled by the previous owner.

2 years later, in 2023, I finally have a garden with good production of leafy greens, beans, and other vegetables as opposed to the abundance of cherry tomatoes. Don’t get me wrong, I love cherry tomatoes, it’s the only way I’ll eat them now, but one person can only eat some many tomatoes because he/she gets sick of them. I think I made a good choice of planting mostly determinate varieties of tomatoes this year as I think the production is more manageable.

As for lawns, I think grass is over-rated, especially in a desert climate like mine where we frequently experience drought. After the governor declared a state of emergency in early 2021, I made the conscious decision to conserve water and to rid my lawn ASAP. In the fall of 2021, the grass in my front lawn and most of the backyard was replaced with rocks.

To be honest, if I had my way, I would’ve got with wood chips or mulch instead of rocks and if I let mom had her way, she would’ve got with over 1,000 bricks just as she did in the house next door where we laid over 1,000 bricks in the backyard back in 2012. Also, if I had my way, instead of planting more fruit trees, I would’ve scattered modular metal raised beds all over the front yard as an extension to my garden in the backyard.