Cleaning Out the New Garden

This new hill garden is enclosed on three sides with stone retaining walls and their height varies depending on the contour of the land. There is no retaining wall on the north side which is two feet higher than the next door neighbor's property. There was a lot of hullabaloo about the boundary between us and this neighbor living on the north side of the property and so the lot was put on status qouo for several years. When the matter was finally settled and the boundaries were made, my late younger brother Paul and some hired relatives worked hard on levelling this hill in preparation for a garden but it came to a point where my brother got sick and had to be hospitalized until he passed away.  Because of the painful memories that has happened over this particular lot, we tried to avoid visiting the place until just recently.  Someone told us that the neighbor on the north side of this lot is trying to encroach on the property once again. This was a wake up call for my family which is why I decided to finish the work and make this lot into a new vegetable garden.   

In all of those 13 years that we did not cultivate the land, the neighbors on three sides of the property has made this lot their dumping site for their garbage. Without asking any permission from us, they dug up some holes and burned their trash on the lot. Where they burned their trash, the soil is blackish which is okay as it made fertilizer for the soil but they also threw some broken bottles or glasses with their trash!  Every time that we dig up a shovelful of dirt in the area where they burned their trash, more broken glasses would come up! We had to hand-pick these broken pieces of glass very carefully least we cut our hands in the process of cleaning it out. It was very time consuming but it had to be done. We also had to dig up all the tall weeds and deep-rooted grasses that had grown all over the garden. It took us four and a half days just cleaning up the whole area. Now we could finally say that the lot is free from trash and weeds and most especially broken bottles and glasses.

Location of Hill Garden

This is a picture of my DH Brad and my younger sister Julie playing games while we were on our way to the big hill garden to do some planting. The hill garden is located some 300 meters away from our place. To go to this garden, we follow the end of the road in our village. In the picture above, just behind my DH is the roof of the waiting shed which is the end of the road and this is also the turning point for all private and public utility vehicles including taxis. We turn left from this waiting shed and follow a walkway that goes downhill passing by some of our neighbor's houses. Then we cross a small foot bridge and some neighbor's gardens which is on a flat area and then we go uphill to reach the hill garden.  At the top of the hill garden is the national road. Fifty meters from the the top of the garden is the new main gate of Camp John Hay. There is actually a short cut that leads to the main gate of the former American base by using the trail from the foot bridge going past the flat gardens below and then going uphill and one would come up to the main gate in about 8 minutes. Anyway, my late mother has been tending and tilling this hill garden since Peace Time or since after WW2. There are a lot of tall pine trees in this hill garden which makes it too shady for vegetable planting.