The Wisconsin Gardener

cc You're looking at photos of an auto salvage yard just outside of Mineral Point. Lovely, isn't it? Well, now fast forward about 12 years and you're looking at paradise. We're in the home and garden of Jennifer and John Sharp just outside of Mineral Point. Jennifer, you looked at this 12 years ago and you saw potential that I'm not sure anybody else could see. This is incredible and it's also an official wildlife habitat. I look at that photo and think I'd run screaming the other direction! What on earth made you buy that piece of property when it looked like a junkyard? Well, it has a beautiful stream and it's also right around the corner from Mineral Point. Also, I might add, being artists, it was well priced. Okay, so it was the water and the location. Yet, you probably had horrendous clean up to do to make it not only livable, but pretty. Well, it was clean on the surface. They had taken the junk off. We ended up getting 12,000 cubic yards of dirt that the DOT was getting rid of. We had it hauled and had the whole place capped with about 2-4 feet of clay subsoil. Oh, clay, that's good. So you had to not only rebuild the soil well, tell me, you built everything here. Uh-huh. Tell me about that. Well, we tried to do an energy efficient green-built home actually universally accessible, too. We started, because on the north side we needed to have protection for the house. We built a berm and we used old cement slabs that we'd gotten from our property as the base for our berm, and then put other rocks and dirt on top and made a rock garden. At one end of that it almost looks more like a southwestern garden with those beautiful grasses. Well, John's a Utahn so that's his western cactus garden. Nice of you to let him have a little piece of garden! When you say "we built" literally, you and John built the garage you both, hands-on built the house. In fact, you did the rock work on the corners of the house. John did some of the bigger rock work. All the bigger rock work, yeah. He has a special toy. So we're talking really, really big rocks, okay. Throughout the garden, you can see examples of his work. Yes, we have rocks everywhere. With it being a salvage yard did you have to worry about soil contamination at all? I had it tested for heavy metals at the university lab, and yes, the lead was high. We're in lead mining country, in addition to the salvage yard. But we have 8.5 pH soil so they said that the lead was all bound up and it was not a concern. Well, you lucked out there. So the plants did well. Everything's happy, because it's not contaminated. It's not contaminated, because it's capped but I had to build soil for the plants to grow in. We got the city leaves for many years and made all our soil from leaf compost from the city. I've heard of starting from scratch but this is taking it to a new level! Let's talk about some of your favorite places. There's so many, but I would assume because you bought this because of the water that the stream is one of them. Yes, we like the stream. John has done a great job with all the rock work along the banks of it. He pulled out much junk and other cement slabs. I had one car body at my insistence, to show what it was. Kind of a memento. Yes, and an old safe. You have an old safe in the stream? Is that useful for anything? Well, we joke that it's good for cooling beer. And maybe a little heavy. Yes, too heavy to lift it up. Near that same area, you've got like a rock garden There's a crevice garden which a newer thing people do with rock gardens. I made that on a sand pile from rocks we found on the property when John was cleaning up the stream bed. You've got windows throughout the house that look out on all these pieces of beautiful gardening. So far, one of my favorite spots is right here this herb garden. That's my other favorite place because it's right outside my kitchen window. It's green just as soon as the snow melts in the spring. A beautiful location right outside. You know, we shouldn't forget you've got a very productive vegetable garden. But really, everywhere you look I mean, a wildlife sanctuary, running water. It's fantastic that you saw the vision of an auto salvage yard and turned it into this little piece of quiet and beauty. Well, we were both professional artists so finally, we wanted to do something for ourselves by ourselves. I think you did a fantastic job. Thank you for sharing it with us. You're welcome.