MOMO'S GARDEN JOURNAL

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To begin, this blog is named after our indoor cat, Momo. We actually have two cats: Momo and Maxie. Maxie is a foodie while Momo is our garden watch. He just loves perching by the big window facing our garden and listening to all kinds of sounds from nature.

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In the summer of 2019, we moved into our very own house. A typical suburb house with a backyard in Georgia, USA. We loved everything about that it, except for this 1/3 acre of land. It was more of a wild woods than a typical yard. And it was sitting on a hill which meant we were in for some serious flooding and soil erosion issues when it rained heavily. The local soil is red clay and not easy to work with. In the area without shade, nothing seemed to grow in the cracked dry clay dirt. The woods were formed by native oak trees and hickory trees (which later became precious to us as they offered tasty acorns and hickory nuts to all of our animal friends). If you stepped inside the woods, your ankles would be buried by all these fallen leaves that had been piled for years.

 

The first summer, we could not stay outside because of the crazy clouds of mosquitos. Caterpillars would fall randomly from the top. Bees living under the leaves attacked us whenever they felt like it. Snakes were also making this land their ideal home. It was wild with wildlife all right, but it was not a garden with easy access. It seemed impossible for a young couple who did not have much savings to hire professionals to convert this backyard dramatically. So we quickly decided to only make use of the deck area where a small flower bed existed as our starting point.

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Guess what happened in the whole world in 2020. Covid-19 happened. All trips canceled, restaurants and shops were closed. Cities were under lockdown. The only places we could go were grocery stores and garden centers (conveniently). We watched a lot of Netflix and discovered Monty Don's Small Places, Big Dreams, a British variety show demonstrating how people with different backgrounds changed their backyards with limited budgets and made a beautiful impact on their lives. And then we were further converted by Monty into faithful followers of BBC's Gardener's World. If British people could do all the amazing gardening themselves, why not us? Maybe we don't always need to hire professionals and use heavy machines to recreate our backyard. Maybe we could cope with what it is originally and tailor it into our own version of paradise. Maybe it is a blessing that we had the steep hills, the slopes, woods, meadows with "weeds", monkey grasses, mosses, dead tree logs, and even two giant holes on the ground that were caused by fallen trees and used by previous owners as backyard trash dumps.