I love growing plants, and especially gardening. Its so relaxing to come home from a long day at work and mill around in the garden. Watching the plants grow fascinates me to no end, and whats better than fresh vegetables/flowers/spices you grew yourself?
This year is a particularly interesting to me, as its my first growing season living in the hills. Previously, I lived in prairieland in the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River Delta. There was 6-13ft of very humus-rich well drained topsoil depending on wherever I happened to be at the time. It was such a great place to grow things in the ground.
Now I'm living in very rough, hard to traverse terrain. Its on a rocky sedimentary plateau
on top of an igneous mountain range. There is a ton of limestone, dolomite, and sandstone so I also have alkaline soil to deal with. There is also very thin topsoil. Its like 3-6in here before I hit very thick solid clay.
Because I am renting, and my backyard is more of a large dog pen than a yard, I decided against raised beds. I'm technically not supposed to destroy the yard either, but they seem pretty lax about a lot of the rules. Its all weeds anyway, and the areas I'm not gardening in I've roughed up and planted turf grass. So if anything its improving the property.
Since 3-6in of topsoil over hard clay is no good for large plants, I've tilled it by hand to about 12in or so. I then mixed in generous amounts of peat to help lower the pH and keep the soil from being so solid. Then I fertilized with some bone & blood meal leftover from last year (not enough, really, so I added some 20-20-20), large amounts of composted cow & horse manure, and some bagged sandy topsoil.
Then got the soil to a more workable, spongy texture. The plants are doing pretty well, though its a PITA to water all of then since I don't have an outdoor water spigot of any sort.
So far I have a variety of heirloom tomatos popular in my state (arkansas traveler, etc), roma, early girl, beefsteak, cherry, grape, etc. I tried to stay away from the determinate varieties so I can force produce on friends all season. I have a lot of peppers as well. I love peppers, and think they are fun to grow. There is a ton of cayenne, because I eat it on everything and enjoy growing/grinding my own. They also grow very well in the high humidity and heat of the south US. Other than that I've got some tobasco, habenero, serrano, anaheim, jalapeno, sweet banana, hot banana, and a variety of bell peppers (purple, yellow, sweet, red, etc). Since I had peppers and tomatos, and access to homegrown onions and garlic I planted some cilantro so that I can have homegrown salsa all summer.
I have a variety of basil for pesto and whatnot: genovese, sweet, purple ruffled, spicy bush/globe, lemon, cinnamon. There is some st. john wort because I got a pack of free seeds, lavender, rosemary, sage, oregano, irish moss (that I figured I'd periodically harvest and offer to my homebrewing buddies as a clarifying agent), a few varieties of potted turf grass (which I need to find minature pink flamingos for), and too many packets of seeds I haven't had time to plant yet.
I've also got a number of native plants I'm growing out from wild-collected seeds/cuttings, and seed from local nurseries. I'm excitied about this. I'd like to see how they do in their natural habitat with the benefit of gardening experience. This includes things like echinacea, passionflower, virginia creeper, briar (pisses my GF off for some reason.. guess she got poked by it too many times as a kid), and a small sassafras sapling.