Keyhole Farm

2013 — EARLY JUNE PHOTO SPLASH

Leon — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 22:07:38 +0000

By W. Leon Smith This update of the Keyhole Farm keyhole garden site contains something different, a look at some of the insects that play a part in our gardening adventure, primarily my trying to get creative in capturing their images. But to backtrack briefly, our keyhole gardens are doing very well On the menu [...]

2013 — MID-MAY: PLANTS ARE REALLY GROWING!

Leon — Sat, 18 May 2013 01:45:05 +0000

By W. Leon Smith It’s been about a month since our last update and so far this year, the Keyhole Farm keyhole gardens are doing very well. If you check back (bar at left) to the last post and the ones prior to it, you can get a pretty solid idea of where we’ve been [...]

2013 KEYHOLE GARDEN TOUR BIG SUCCESS

Leon — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 03:12:43 +0000

By W. Leon Smith On April 16, Keyhole Farm participated in Dr. Deb’s Keyhole Garden Tour (A Garden Adventure in Bosque County, Texas) where approximately 225 garden enthusiasts primarily from different parts of Texas toured numerous keyhole gardens near Clifton, including our seven, during a period of about five hours. Following the tour was a [...]

2013 – MID-APRIL UPDATE ON GARDENS

Leon — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 02:23:47 +0000

By W. Leon Smith It’s been a little over a month since I planted this year’s new batch of keyhole gardens, including about 40 or 50 different plant varieties. Since the weather was nice and planting took place a little earlier than usual, we worried a lot about late freezes, and, of course, since this [...]

2013 OFF TO A HOT START FOR KEYHOLES

Leon — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 04:38:41 +0000

By W. Leon Smith Hot start in the new year? Weather-wise, it is. This winter has been warm in Central Texas compared to most, which has made preparing to garden in the spring a daunting experience. It’s looking like spring already (this is being penned on March 14), so the urge to plant and take [...]

2012 KEYHOLE GARDEN REVIEW

Leon — Sat, 13 Oct 2012 01:50:56 +0000

By W. Leon Smith KeyholeFarm gardens have produced abundantly this year, thanks largely to some excellent weather and, of course, some TLC. A wide variety of crops were raised, the usual tomatoes, asparagus, green beans, cantaloupes, watermelons, black-eyed peas, squash, zucchini, and the list goes on, but my favorites to raise are pumpkins, sunflowers, and [...]

KEYHOLE GARDENS — KEY TO THE FUTURE!

Leon — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 03:07:31 +0000

It has been a long time since we have updated this site, due to my involvement in a lot of other activities, although part of those activities included an excellent year in raising crops during 2011. Among our best keyhole offsprings this year were a variety of herbs, tomatoes, black-eyed peas, sunflowers, and some of the richest sticks of okra I have ever seen. Now we are getting ready for next year and have been conducting further work on our keyholes, including experimenting with a bamboo skirt to make the garden blend into some backgrounds.

Billy Martin is pictured in the associated photos installing such a skirt and building a metal frame for an additional garden.

MY FIRST KEYHOLE GARDEN

Leon — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:00:00 +0000

When I was a kid my mother had a garden in a vacant lot next to where we lived. I personally had nothing to do with it except to eat some of the vegetables and watch her pulling up weeds. When a little older, I would occasionally go to my neighbors who raised potatoes in a field behind their house and stomp dirt clods for them. Later, my stomping was transferred to one of my grandmothers’ gardens out in the country where I enjoyed putting out the lights on grasshoppers (I was eight or nine at the time). I only made a dent, however, as they are quite prolific.

When I became an adult, my wife and I had a big garden patch beside our house in town where we raised a variety of crops, the most abundant being black-eyed peas and green beans. I had a row or two where I experimented (very successfully) with watermelons, which were the best I had ever eaten. We had a scarecrow in the midst of the rows. About the only thing he scared was my daughter when I made up stories about him and weird faces to match (weird faces were not hard for me, as I come pre-equipped).