Many disabled people reside in apartments or townhouses. This means your gardening space may be restricted to small balconies or patios or postage stamp-sized yards. You may also have definite regulations about what you can and cannot do. I suggest you check with your complex managers to find out what is permitted before starting a garden. However, gardening is good therapy for the disabled so let's look at some possibilities.
Since the desire to garden frequently develops after choosing a place to live, you may wind up becoming a shade gardener. Shade gardening presents even the most dedicated gardener with a real challenge. If you ask the local nursery to recommend good flowering plants for the shade, you'll be told to use begonias and impatiens. It's easy to have a boring garden year after year if you stick to these recommendations. I faced another difficult problem. My unit borders the driveway to the shared parking lot. This means the plants grown on the side of my unit have to survive the heat coming from the brick walls of the townhouse and the asphalt driveway. This is tough gardening in almost solid clay!
Future articles will discuss shade gardening and tough plants for impossible places. Although I won't necessarily be suggesting techniques to make your garden tasks easier, the plants suggested basically can take care of themselves.
My townhouse complex gives every family several six-packs of annuals each May and challenges us to create gardens to be judged the first weekend in August. My first summer, I decided to plant them in my front yard. I was immediately faced with three problems: poor soil (whole bricks were dug up while planting), a northern exposure, and the desire for flowers the first week in August. Let's look at solving these common problems.
The soil problem proved easy to solve. I just dug in 40-pound bags of Michigan peat for the next few years. You may have access to compost instead. Many years later, the soil is fast draining down to a foot deep where it hits solid clay. This has proven enough depth for annuals, bulbs and perennials. When I started, I also had to contend with roots from several large, old shrubs. It was difficult to maintain adequate moisture levels — a condition called dry shade. Therefore, I had to keep adding organic matter and mulch each year to help keep the soil moist. This past year those shrubs were replaced with some dwarf varieties that shouldn't spread as much or provide such deep shade.
