BELFAST — A decade ago on Wight Street, two Belfast healthcare practitioners found the perfect site on which to build their new home. But to fulfill their dreams of a garden, the land was a patient in need of resuscitation.
On Saturday, July 22, the Belfast Garden Club will showcase the eco-friendly garden family physician and epidemiologist Peter Millard and his wife, nurse Emily Wesson, created out of terrain mixed with hard-packed gravel, broken concrete, and asphalt.
Their garden at 29 Wight Street in Belfast will be open to the public from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., rain or shine. Admission is $5. It is the fifth of nine private gardens the club is featuring on Saturdays through Aug. 19 as part of its summer event series, Open Garden Days.
Today, the garden on Millard and Wesson’s one-and-a-half-acre property is a sunny, south-facing plot filled with “edibles and visuals,” Millard says, everything from tomatoes and corn to peaches and raspberries. When they bought the property, howevr, the City of Belfast was using it under agreement with the owners as a transfer station for dirt removed from drainage areas.
To revive the land for their purposes, Millard and Wesson, lifelong gardeners, were given huge amounts of dirt from the City of Belfast’s ditch-digging work. The best soil went to the garden while the clay and gravel helped the couple build the lawn.
“We made a fine stone wall from all the rocks that we dug out of the site and recycled all the asphalt,” Millard says.
The garden is irrigated by means of an inventive rainwater catchment system. The couple uses seaweed, leaves, and woodchips extensively for mulch. This garden, they say, has proved how important it is to use organic matter to improve soil quality.
“We use and compost everything,” Emily Wesson says. “If it grew here, it should go back into the soil one way or another.”
Millard and Wesson are also going to begin experimenting with the soil additive biochar to enhance the lawn and garden areas ith clay soil.
For more on the Open Garden Days schedule, visit belfastgardenclub.org. Proceeds support the garden club’s school programs, camp scholarships, library donations, and Belfast’s public gardens.
