I have been gardening since my father gave me a tiny plot of ground to fill with iris when I was about 8 years old. It has been a life long love and hobby, though there have been more failures than spectacular results. This year my husband and I have finally put a fully automatic watering system into my garden and so I’m hoping for more consistent results. We’ve also expanded the number of raised bed boxes significantly and changed to good old sterilized steer manure as the bedding material instead of commercial potting blends. We’re anxious to see what comes of this. Our soil is only about 1-4 feet of red clay overlaying serpentine; for the most part it is all like concrete. Our place sits near the bottom of an east slope of a little north-south valley and we suffer from some severe freezes in our micro climate (5° F). We are also an amazingly fruitful deer habitat. Our property has very mixed flora environment: lots of horse pasture surrounded with eucalyptus groves, oaks of several varieties, Deodar & Incense cedars, pines, and hundreds of other trees, shrubs, flowers, & herbs we’ve planted over the years, so we enjoy the presence of an enormous bird population and the rest of the normal Sierra foothills fauna.