Before/After: Food in the Foothills
I first met Jen in the fall of 2021. She hired me to come out to her garden for a consultation, and I was immediately impressed by the size of her space. She had a maze of eight raised beds lovingly built by her dad with vertically laid pieces of lumber. Each bed had customized wire cages with hinges to keep out the deer, a herd of which moved through the Warm Springs Mesa on a daily basis.
The original garden at Jen’s
The garden wasn’t producing the way she hoped it would, and in the late fall, I could see why. Her soil had reduced quite a bit and felt dry to the touch, so I recommended a different irrigation layout and layers of conditioning compost. I also created a planting plan for her space as it was, knowing that she wanted to make what she had work before making any larger changes.
She planned to implement the irrigation changes and add the soil with the help of her family, and we agreed to check in the following spring to see how things had gone. I was so pleased to hear that the changes in irrigation and the added compost made her spring garden more productive than it had been, but now Jen was having trouble keeping up with the daily harvesting, processing and replanting she could now do in her space.
A late season image of Jen’s original garden during a maintenance visit
I offered to maintain Jen’s garden on a bi-weekly basis starting that spring, and have been doing so ever since. The garden beds her dad built were beautiful but the cages on them made the now-abundant garden challenging to work in. The slatted-style build of them was also breaking down as the expansion/contraction of the soil warped the wood. At the end of our 2023 season, we proposed a new plan for the garden - a black steel potager with arches for plant supports that would blend seamlessly with her pollinator-focused space.
We began working on the overhaul of the space right away so we did not miss a beat in the spring of 2024. I’m happy to report that the garden looks beautiful - you can see it from overhead in this video (also below). We planted the first season in March with ample greens, kale, root vegetables, Swiss Chard and more.
One of the concerns Jen had when we redesigned the space was that it was overall less square footage than she had before. I assured her that it would be more productive and less of a burden this way. I’m happy to say that after some troubleshooting with the deer and irrigation, the garden had an extremely productive series of seasons in 2025.
An overall image of Jen’s garden when it all grew in
I love so many things about this garden, but most of all, I love that there’s now an open space in the center of it for Jen and her family to gather with friends or simply just be in their garden and appreciate the wonder of the abundance around them. This garden turned out to be not only stylish, modern, elegant and overall stunning to look at, but the functionality of the space, accessibility of all of the beds and ability to grow vertically on the trellises make it one of the most efficient spaces we maintain.
It’s just so dreamy!
If you’d like to explore a garden renovation with us, book a consultation on our calendar.