Rock Garden at 93 Pequot

Mom and I wanted a big vegetable garden and the installation of a septic field for our new house had laid waste to a huge area just outside our bedroom window toward the driveway. It was ugly, stumps of trees, littered with rocks and piles of dirt dug up in burying the septic-tank, three dry wells and the extensive leeching fields: all required by code.

On two sides, it was almost at the same grade of the front lawn, but the hill fell off sharply and the stone wall we built was at eye-level standing outside the far corner. We had to buy several truckloads of dirt to fill the basin we created. The posts supported a four-foot green-wire fence. Years later, I sunk a strip of 18 inch green-wire fencing into the ground on two sides to stop burrowing critters.

For many year, we harvested plentiful vegetables each summer; including oddballs like rhubarb, brussel-sprouts and novel cabbages. At first there was wide open sky, but, as you suspected, the trees grew inward later.

Note that the portion of the 4x4 timbers that we built into the wall as fence posts are dark brown. We were too broke to buy pressure treated wood, so I set up a barrel and soaked the posts for weeks in preservative.

It was a massive project. It astonished me, seeing these pictures, how energetic we were and how we had the time to build it. Mom remembers me cheering her on, praising her work. What she kept hearing was “Keep Chinking Bev” and that’s an expression the family still use in related situations.

We had one serious wall collapse when a tree that was ill advisedly built into the wall took it badly and died (you can see it in one of the pictures). We rebuilt, and on our visits to 93 Pequot Lane well after the house was sold in 2007, our garden stood proud. The new owner essentially razed the whole hilltop to flat land to build their sprawling home and five car garage, so our wall became land-fill.

The pile of rocks in the foreground was the material for the curving retaining wall just outside my downstairs shop door that lead to the front brick walkway.

Our land was easy pickings for rocks, and my new (at the time) Vermont wheelbarrow let be retrieve more them from the nearby woods.