Garden Train (ɡärdən trān)
A garden railroad is a model railway set up outdoors in a garden. We run G gauge trains in ours. A garden is “a piece of ground, usually close to a house, for growing vegetables, fruits, flowers, ornamental shrubs or trees, etc.”
Our yard is laid out unusually. We live in a 100+ year old farmhouse with no farm left. The fields on one side were sold to the county for a school complex. All we have now on that side is our driveway and a couple pecan trees. What land is left on the other side of the house has our septic field under it. There is no back yard at all, that was all sold off for a housing development. That leaves us with a fairly large front yard as the only open spot we can recreate on, so that is where our train layout lives and our gardening is squeezed in there too.
We just finished up our third year of vegetable gardening within our train garden and now we’re starting the new season. Yep, here on North Carolina’s coastal plain region we start planting in January. Sweet peas will go in first followed by carrots. Really though, gardening just carries over from season to season. We still have kale, mustard and rutabagas growing in some of the raised beds.
Last year we grew English peas, two varieties of Southern beans and two of green beans. We had a very good crop of carrots and a miserable bunch of paste tomatoes. Figs and pecans were abundant, sweet peppers not so much so; though in the pepper’s defense they were sort of overrun by the Conch Peas that I was unable to keep under control.
The Conch and Whippoorwill Southern/Cow peas we grew are both vigorous climbing varieties and need more support than we gave them, we have something stronger planned for this year. The sprawl of the conch peas made two of our train tracks unusable for much of the growing season.
Dismal Creek Railroad 