Home, Sweet Homes - Southwood Drive, Woodland, CA (Part II)

 

Garden photos (Rufio and Pan loved laying in the straw) from 2019.

The back patio - my favorite forest bathing spot! Circa 2019.

When Megan and I moved into the Southwood Drive house, Joe was in the middle of landscaping the yard. The lot was deep, which made it easy to add onto the house and still have a good-sized backyard. The landscaper Joe hired poured a concrete patio with steps into the house and added concrete mow strips in the yard, leaving a dirt border that Joe could turn into a garden. He planted two orange trees, a lemon tree, and a persimmon tree. Later on, he added a grape arbor, and eventually the vines grew thick enough to shade the back of the house.

The front yard was all grass at first, with a mow strip near the house so we could plant flowers or shrubs between the mow strip and the front porch. There was already a huge maple tree out front that gave us great shade. We ended up losing that tree during a big storm in the late 1990s. When it came down, it missed our neighbor’s car and roof by just a few inches. Our own roof only had some minor damage to the edge—pretty lucky, considering.

Over time, the backyard slowly turned more and more into a garden. By early 2010, Joe decided he wanted to go all in and make the whole backyard a garden. He pulled up the rest of the grass, turned the soil, and started planting winter vegetables. After a while, all the compost and straw we added made the soil rise a couple of inches above the patio, and we had to level it out so water wouldn’t pool there when it rained.

The yard also saw a lot of soccer practice. Back in 1994, my mom was working for Ohio Art in Bryan, Ohio—the company that made the Etch-A-Sketch. Around 1996, they came out with a portable backyard soccer goal. That might’ve been one of Megan and Lauren’s favorite gifts from Grandma Karnes. It got a lot of use.

When the drought in California got worse, Joe decided to turn the front yard into a garden too. Once the lawn was gone, we added a pomegranate tree, a pluot tree, some herbs, and native plants. In 2016 or so, we tossed a few poppy seeds into the front yard—just a handful. Ever since then, from March to May, the yard fills up with orange and white flowers. It’s amazing how just a few seeds can take over like that, in the best way.

May 2, 2019 Poppies in the front yard.

One of the best parts of having the garden was being able to walk outside and grab fresh vegetables or herbs for dinner. Food straight from the garden always tasted better.

Joe really loved his little microfarm. Some of our friends started calling him “Farmer Joe,” and he didn’t mind that at all. His backup plan, if the economy ever totally fell apart, was to grow all his own food. His love of the land—and good, healthy food we could grow ourselves—was a big part of why we moved to Minnesota in 2023. He wanted to live somewhere with reliable water and land he could work

Looking back, it’s hard to imagine those years without the garden. It shaped so much of our daily life—and Joe’s, especially.