Darrell Ross

Gardening

Well perhaps gardening is not an art and perhaps it is. Either way, I love gardening and am good at it. I spent the first six years of my life on a ranch in the Okanogan River Valley in Northern Washington. My Dad worked irrigation for the rancher and in return we got one of the ranch houses. In addition to the irrigation work, my Dad ran a mail-order seed company out of the basement. We grew most of the seeds behind our house in a 2-acre garden. I had my own little plot as soon as I could dig in the dirt.

I have some photos of my most recent garden on my Picasa site — 1017A Coach Way Garden. This particular house did not have any gardening space so I filled an old bed frame with a mixture of top-soil, compost, bone meal, and blood meal and planted some of my favorite crops. The aphids got quite bad on the zucchini and I attempted combating them with lady bugs; it worked pretty well.