Our Wisconsin Rapids Home and Backyard Organic Gardening

Wisconsin Rapids

This hub will showcase a few old pictures taken of our Wisconsin Rapids home and the backyard organic gardening that kept me happily engaged from Spring until those first frosty days approaching Fall and Winter.

Summers can be short up in that neck of the woods particularly when it comes to gardening.

We had occasional late freezes in the early days of June and by early September, all bets were off with regard to counting upon weather conducive to growing bountiful harvests from the garden.

Thus it was a more compacted season of growing compared to gardening in the South, but it was most enjoyable!

The four years my husband and I along with our dogs got to live in Wisconsin Rapids is now like a bookmark in a favorite well thumbed album of memories.

Wisconsin home

Our trip to Wisconsin Rapids from Houston, Texas in the mid-1970's in the month of January is etched in our minds.

We not only traveled about 1300 miles by car with our Irish Setter dog, Kelly, but we also experienced a 100 degree variation in temperature within a couple of days!

The day we pulled away from our town home in Houston, Texas the balmy temperature was 80 degrees Fahrenheit. The night that our belongings were being moved into our new home in Wisconsin Rapids, the blustery temperature was a minus 20 degrees! Brrr!

Pristine white snow blanketed the ground and the many trees surrounding our new house delighted our senses.

It had been a long time since the days when we were both young and got to see snow in the wintertime!

On an earlier house-hunting excursion we had selected a tri-level 3 bedroom, 2 bath home on a half acre lot. The 3 bedrooms and 1 bathroom were upstairs. Another room that could have served as an extra bedroom plus the family room with fireplace and second bathroom was below the bedrooms. That portion of the house with the family room was partially built below ground level but had windows above ground.

Under the kitchen, dining and living area was a full basement which was a few steps further down from the family room to access it. Thus there were really 4 distinct levels to that house making for interesting construction.

There was a field and trees which was undeveloped across from us and the neighbors around us had even more land...an acre or even more.

I had spent my early childhood in the countryside of Wisconsin with lots of fields and wooded areas and this appeared to me to be like a little bit of heaven with all of that space surrounding us. My husband's first 10 years were spent in small Iowa towns.

Naturally there would be adjustments in lifestyle coming from what was then the 5th largest city in the country to a metropolitan area of around 30,000 people and a few surprises awaited us.

Country lots

That first winter passed fairly quickly as my husband was settling into his new job as a marketing manager for Butler Paper Company which was headquartered in Port Edwards adjacent to Wisconsin Rapids.

At the same time we were transforming that new house into our new home.  It had been a builder's spec home so was finished only up to a certain point.  We were able to make selections of carpeting and other things to our liking.

We did not realize that all of those white painted walls were merely an undercoat of paint, so we rolled up our sleeves and tackled that project of painting a room at a time.

Our biggest surprise of all came when the melting snow exposed what we thought would be our lawn.

Coming from Houston, a lawn of grass always accompanies the purchase of any house.

What we found instead was a half acre of primarily sand!

Taking the time to first cut down quite a few of the over 40 trees on our property (many of which were small and scrubby) we had to have 40 truckloads of topsoil dumped and spread out onto our acreage in order to plant the grass seed.

We also had to have another point drilled and pounded into the ground to access more water for keeping our yard and garden hydrated. Surprise, surprise and a few expenses that we had not expected!

Another discovery was that the exterior of the house was also only painted with primer. So another painting job awaited us as the weather warmed.

My husband and I became pretty experienced at wielding paint brushes and rollers!

As soon as the ground had thawed out sufficiently we had a chain link fence put around the back portion of our home so that we could safely let our soon to be two dogs out to roam and play and not have to worry about their safety.

Landscape gardening

While my husband was busy criss-crossing the country visiting the many Butler Paper divisions and branches plus major paper mill suppliers and implementing new marketing strategies, I had lots of time to get to know our neighbors and develop a landscape gardening design.

My maternal grandfather had always had large gardens filled with both vegetables and flowers and with a half an acre at my disposal I took full advantage of the chance to try my hand at gardening.

Laying out a design and utilizing a corner of the yard with the fencing that would support different crops my adventure with organic vegetable gardening began.

I had a few things to learn!

One of the first lessons was that one does not have to plant 43 tomato plants for a household of two occupants even if they both really love tomatoes!

The first harvested homegrown tomatoes were savored and relished. There is nothing better than a homegrown northern tomato!

When all 43 tomato plants started producing a bumper crop, there was no way to keep up with eating that kind of volume even though I gave away as many tomatoes as our friends and neighbors could handle.

Some of our neighbors had their own gardens!

So calling upon memories of my childhood when my mother and grandmother used to do a lot of canning, I quickly learned how to add that means of preserving all of those succulent and vine ripened tomatoes to my learning curve of living in the countryside of Wisconsin Rapids.

Oh how I loved to count the sound of the canning lids when they popped into place forming a complete seal as they cooled from their water bath. Such a feeling of accomplishment!

Composting

Each Spring of the year our compost pile which consisted of most of the vegetative matter generated from the garden along with eggshells, coffee grounds and the like was transported and rototilled into the ground along with bags of manure.

After letting the ground rest just a bit, the new planting season would begin.

About the only thing that I did not throw on the compost pile that was vegetable in nature were the tomato vines. Apparently diseases can be transmitted even after being broken down and composted...so those were disposed of in the garbage.

Garden flowers

My grandmother had given me some of her lemon yellow day lilies which I admired from her home in Okauchee, Wisconsin.

They were planted around the birdbath which became a focal point of our garden design. We also had tiger lilies and tulips and a few other plants from her home.

She had always enjoyed gardening with flowers and other plants.

The year of our move from Houston to Wisconsin Rapids, my grandmother had decided to sell her home on Okauchee Lake and move to a condominium on Oconomowoc Lake so we were fortunate in that we were able to get some of her yard equipment like rakes, shovels and other things.

Organic gardening

I decided to use organic gardening methods as did most of my Wisconsin Rapids neighbors.

Oh the year that our neighbors used chicken manure from her parent's farm!

The strong smell lingered for quite some time, but their garden turned out to be lush and productive.

Instead of spraying chemical insecticides,  I planted some flowers that repelled insects, like marigolds.  This I learned from my grandfather.

Companion plantings of vegetables and flowers worked well together in organic gardening and it was also visually appealing.

We always had cut flowers in the house or bouquets that could be given away.

One thing that is important to successfully do organic gardening is to rotate the crops.

If tomato plants are planted in one part of the garden one year, then another spot should be selected the following year for the tomatoes. This is pretty much the same for all vegetables.

The reason behind this is that the soil can be depleted from certain nutrients if the same crop is continually planted and also certain diseases can more readily be imparted if the same plants are planted in the same spot over and over again.

This I also credit to learning from my grandfather walking through his gardens those many years prior to my own gardening attempts.

All in all, my organic gardening was a huge success.

We had shelving full of canned items and an upright freezer filled to the brim with frozen vegetables going into the Winter months each year. We also helped to feed many neighbors and friends who did not have their own gardens.

Gardening was not only a fun pass-time but it certainly provided health benefits of not only good exercise and fresh air, but wonderful organic vegetables to fill our bodies with nourishing and good tasting food.

Vegetables

Among other things grown in our garden during those 4 years some things were only tried once, like corn and okra. The corn took up too much space and was inexpensively purchased elsewhere and the okra took too long to mature just starting to produce when the first freezing weather approached.

Regularly grown were the following vegetables:

Tomatoes...just fewer than 43 plants after that first year!

Lettuce...up to 8 different varieties including things like spinach and Swiss chard. My husband perfected making Caesar salads!

Green beans

Peppers

Carrots

Radishes

Eggplant

Chinese pea pods and regular English peas

Onions

Different herbs like parsley and dill

Cucumbers

Zucchini and other squash like Butternut

Turnips and Rutabagas and a few things I have probably forgotten!

The last year (not knowing it would be the last year prior to being transferred back to Houston) we constructed a tiered strawberry bed and my husband, claiming that it was some of the most back breaking work he ever had to do...dug an asparagus bed.

Admittedly, following instructions he dug what could have looked like a grave to onlookers of said project.

The asparagus bed was about 2 feet deep and wide and about 6 feet long. After soaking the 3 year old asparagus roots and spreading them out like the fingers of a hand, they were strategically placed over some fresh compost and the earth was filled in over it and tapped down into place.

I hope the new owners enjoyed the fruits of that labor!

Hope you enjoyed this look back at our Wisconsin Rapids home and the backyard organic gardening that took place while living there. We have many fond memories of those times back in the 1970's and I particularly loved the gardening that I got to do while there.