| Tam's Gardens
In the 1970s I lived in beautiful places
in the Monterey Peninsula area with yards big enough for me to indulge
my love of gardening. My current life with its time and space constraints
doesn't permit this -- and I miss it.
| 1973: My first garden, in the
backyard of a house on 15th St. near Pacific Grove beach. I
shared this wild, hard- drinking place with, among others, Kent Crawford,
Steve Nelson, and Pat Torrey.
The soil was an incredibly rich loam
called "Indian shell mound" that needed no preparation. We ate well
from this little backyard farm.
I'm having a staredown here with Kent's
black cat "Lucifer".
(Photo by Kent Crawford) |
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1975: My parents, Gordon
& Eleanor Newell, by the "squash patch"
of my largest and most productive garden.
On LaRancheria Rd. in Carmel Valley,
the hard adobe soil here needed additional organic matter, nitrogen (courtesy
of our chickens), rototilling, and plenty of hard work. |
| 1975: Me in my cornfield.
The corn eventually grew several feet taller than this (I'm 6 ft.) -- and
the yield was good, too.
The tall plant left of center is a sunflower.
The idea was that birds would love the seeds so much they'd ignore the
rest of the garden.
The birds indeed loved the seeds from
the giant sunflower heads, but they ate my other plants, too.
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| 1976: Planting time! The
LaRancheria garden site seen from the roof of the house. Note "squash
patch" mounds on the left and furrowed cornfield in center. Once
I got it going, this garden produced abundantly year around. |
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All photographs and text are
the property of Tam McPartland and are protected under United States and
international copyright laws. All rights are reserved and the images
and/or text may not be digitized, reproduced, stored, manipulated, and/or
incorporated into other works without the written permission of the photographer,
Tam McPartland. |
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