Welcome to Magoo

I am an Air Force brat but grew up mainly in middle Georgia, which has hot temperatures, soil is Georgia red clay, and not enough rain...a lot like here - i started gardening when my dad handed me a packet of seeds and pointed to a corner in our yard and said "that spot is yours, take these and see what you can do" - I was about 7...and I have not stopped since-
I have an acre and i am slowly but surely removing the turf and putting in loads of gardens with tons of natives. I have 2 small raised beds, about 8ftX8ft, that are my vegetable gardens. I don't do a lot of veggie gardening cause i don't cook, don't really like a lot of vegetables (i am a junk food junkie from birth) and most of the time it is just me...but i love growing veggies and like to share my veggie stash. Half of one of the beds is 3 ft high and this is my favorite-the pot roast veggie bed - in this bed I grow red potatoes, onions, peppers, garlic and carrots. The other veggie bed has lettuces, cucumbers, squash, tomatoes, beans, gourds and this year I am trying eggplant - only cause the color purple is one of my favorites...I have another 8ftX8ft raised bed that i grew corn in (to go with my pot roast), I would plant sunflowers in with the corn and it is one of the prettiest veggie beds around, but water is a premium in this area and we don't have a well, so i gave up the corn and made it a wildflower patch.

My neighbors all suggest I put in a well, but i am holding out to put in a rain harvesting system,
which I hope will be within the next year. I just cant decide where i want to put a huge container that will hold enough water to handle an acre of gardens. A cistern sounds good, but i have tons of trees and don't want to disturb their roots, if i put it above ground i need a spot that wont disturb the neighbors!

I am an avid composter, very proud of my 16ftX8ft compost bin, (we had some extra trellis laying around and it made the perfect composter). EVERYTHING from my garden goes in my compost bin. I do have a shredder and when it is working I use it...but usually all the yard clippings go in as is. It is a lazy man composter and took a good 2 years to get some soil from it, but well worth it. I also have a little 2ftX2ft compost bin that i layer leaves and grass clippings in and can turn that one over pretty fast.

We have a pond with Koi fish, tons of bullfrogs and it makes the best fertilizer around---pond scum, i call it. The only other fertilizer that i use is alfalfa and molasses twice a year on the lawn and the gardens. I use corn gluten meal as a pre-emergent.

We filled in our ditch about 6 years ago and put in Zoysia Palisades instead of St Augustine and Bermuda, which the lawn was originally set up with. It is a really lush grass, nice and soft, and a glorious gold color in the winter. It is a very thick grass and keeps out the weeds, while the parts of the lawn with St Augustine or Bermuda struggle to keep up and has proven to be as drought & heat tolerant as the Bermuda.

I hope to learn a lot about growing vegetables being a team player in the Veg Heads, I am especially interested in a fall vegetable garden and once I get the rain harvesting in I will once again enjoy Silver Queen corn with my pot roast.

Stay tune and one day I will tell you all why I named my gardens 'Magoo'...