With my own garden growing increasingly haggard and brown, I set off early Saturday morning in search of a little inspiration, and I found it (as well as enough veggies to feed an army) on Caswell Avenue just a mile southeast of my house. I had heard all about Suzie and John Warren’s garden; if you live in Austin and have any interest at all in gardening it would be hard not to.
Less than six months old, the garden has become something of a mecca for gardening enthusiasts. John Dromgoole, the organic gardening guru and owner of the Natural Gardener, recently filmed it for his “Backyard Basics” segment on KLRU’s Central Texas Gardener. Garden designers from the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center have stopped by to take a look. Even UT students have taken an interest; one of them took pictures of it for a photo assignment, which was judged to be the best in a class of over 400 students. It is also the first vegetable garden to be given a Green Garden Award by the City of Austin. In all, over 200 people have taken a tour of this garden, and on Saturday I joined their ranks.
What makes this garden so special? Not only is pleasant to look at, it also produces a ridiculous amount of food. Whereas so many gardens in Central Texas are now withering in the heat, the Warrens’ garden is—to use Suzie’s word—“boomin’.” For the past two and a half months, it has supplied enough vegetables to feed Suzie, her husband John, her son, his wife, two other couples in the neighborhood, and an assortment of friends. What’s their secret? How have they succeeded where so many others have failed? That’s what I was hoping to find out.
I was amused to discover that the yard where the garden sits was once riddled with lugustrums and hackberry trees, just as mine is now. With help from some of their neighbors, the Warrens chopped down all of these trees, and then sent a soil sample off to the Soil, Water and Forage Testing Laboratory at Texas A&M. They discovered that, like most lots in Central Texas, their soil was high in phosphorous but otherwise safe for gardening.
Next they had two truckloads of soil from Garden Ville dumped on their yard, which they used to make a raised bed nearly a foot high. (In retrospect, they would have preferred to have purchased the soil from the Natural Gardener as the soil from Garden Ville contained some dreaded ragweed.) To keep the garden well watered, they installed a drip irrigation system hooked up to four 75-gallon rain barrels that collect rain water off their roof. Because the rain barrels are only about two feet off the ground (see picture), they don’t always produce enough water pressure. As a remedy, local permaculture expert Dick Pierce recommended the Warrens buy a “sprinkler hose” from Breed & Co., which at such low pressure would act just like a soaker hose.
This all seemed like fairly standard operating procedure so I pressed Suzie a little harder. Her garden looked like an oasis in a desert. When I visited, it was at the peak of production. There were big, fat, round, healthy fruits and vegetables everywhere I looked, eggplants as purple and shiny as Barney’s forehead, watermelons and cantaloupes begging to be smashed and feasted upon, chard as high as my knee. Carrots? Check. Beans? Check. Only the tomatoes looked a little off because some pesky stink bugs had found them.
I pressed Suzie for the secret to her success. She suggested cottonseed meal, which they had spread liberally throughout the garden. But I knew that wasn’t it because I had done the same. Finally, after retrieving a little boom box from inside the house, she produced an answer that satisfied me: music. Since the garden’s inception in the spring, she has been playing music for her plants every day. She swears they like Wilson Pickett the best.
