by Deborah Armstrong
(Reprinted from “The Blind Californian,” Winter 2025.)
In sharing my gardening journey with readers, I also wish to pass on tips for those wondering how to garden while blind. I was lucky that I grew up with a mom who loved to grow flowers, and a dad who tried his hand at raising vegetables. Their successes and failures taught me that having a green thumb was more about the willingness to experiment than having a particular talent.
When I moved into my first apartment, it wasn't an inspiring place. I had no yard, no patio, no balcony and not even a porch. But when tomato and some herb plants went on sale, I got creative. The local thrift store had a pile of half-broken chests of drawers they were selling for pennies. I brought home all the drawers, lined them up on either side of the walkway to my front door, and filled them with soil from a friend's garden. There was no need to drill drainage holes: the broken nature of these drawers already had plenty of drainage! Adding a few marigolds and daisies along with the tomatoes, basil, marjoram and thyme, I had an impressive mini garden.
Later, after reading most of the gardening books on NLS, I got more ambitious. I filled my apartment with houseplants and went to local salvage places to gather up suitable materials for tending larger plants. Examples included old washtubs, chimney flues and rusted wheelbarrows. By that time, I'd moved to an apartment complex with a run-down side yard where my motley collection of makeshift growing containers held peas and beans, larger tomato plants and even some mini-fruit trees.
Later, as a homeowner with a career, I was able to leave SSI behind and create a garden which no longer resembled a junkyard. I had raised beds made of landscape timbers: bottomless wooden boxes that were two to three feet tall and three to four feet wide of varying lengths. Much has been written about the advantages of raised beds, including their ability to support a larger number of plants in a smaller space and how they protect plants from extremes of heat and cold. They relieve the gardener from the chores of digging and turning soil and they reduce the need for water. But for the blind gardener, they have one additional advantage.
If you are sighted and grow directly in the ground, you can walk around your plot and see what needs tending. You add a little water here, pull a weed there, prune off some dead flowers and add a stake or two to prop up a plant that needs more support. But if you are blind, you need to touch every plant to see how it's doing. Or if you have some vision, you might have to bend close to inspect each plant. And if your garden is on the ground, you will soon have a sore back from bending, aching knees from kneeling, and you'll become tired overall from crawling around to tend to everything.
This is why we blind folks need to use raised beds. We can walk alongside our beds touching everything at a comfortable height, or sit on a stool for a longer session.
Now that I'm a senior citizen, I garden from a sitting position even more. I have a couple of folding canvas stools and a sturdy garden cart. And, unlike when I started, raised bed kits are readily available from Amazon, Walmart, Lowe’s and Home Depot. They snap, clamp and/or screw together. You no longer need to have woodworking tools or hire someone with carpentry skills to build them from scratch. There are also some wonderfully large fabric growing bags which you can place on bricks to raise them to a reasonable height for tending by touch.
Many people do garden in containers, and I still add quite a few pots to my garden. But it is far more labor-saving to have one or several raised beds, as they need watering less often and can hold a larger amount of soil with its accompanying plant nutrition.
To save on the expense of soil and add to its nutrient density, I put a layer of dead fallen leaves at the bottom of my beds before the soil is added. These will gradually rot, and meanwhile keep weeds from growing up through the ground on which the bed rests.
Quality garden soil and compost can be purchased and delivered by Walmart, Lowe’s or Home Depot, and many cities give compost away for free at certain times of the year. Or you can search locally for landscape supplies and purchase soil by the cubic yard.
Many cities also offer composting classes and compost bins for free. Though I used to make my own compost, I no longer do so simply because I don't have a lawn with grass clippings or enough vegetable scraps to put into it.
In my raised beds I use the square foot method which, though not designed for blind people, is a wonderfully helpful way to keep your garden organized. I divide all my beds into one-foot squares. With wooden beds, I screwed I-hooks into the sides of the beds and strung clothesline across the bed, so each growing space was a square foot. Currently my bed is galvanized steel, so I use magnetic I-hooks with heavy-duty twine to mark my squares. Since I know what's supposed to grow in each square, it's easy for me to locate anything that shouldn't be there, like a snail or a weed.
Keeping records is also important. I note what I planted where and when. For example, on June 29, I planted one square of salad leaf basil, two squares of royal burgundy bush beans, and three squares of different varieties of Swiss chard. This way if a seed doesn't germinate, I will know when I sowed it, and it can be replaced.
These days, I keep this record on a spreadsheet, but 30 years ago, I simply carried a micro-cassette recorder around my garden for recording my progress, and later transcribed my records into Braille. I also continue to note how plants are doing and what the weather is like.
I keep my seed packets in Ziploc bags with a Braille card describing the name, variety, height and growing notes. They are in a file box in alphabetical order. One tip I've shared with those new to Braille is to simply assign each seed packet a number which you can label on the Ziploc with large felt-tipped marker or Braille. Then on your phone or computer, write out the information corresponding to the number. For example, your record might look like this: #22 Nasturtium, variety Little FireBird. Hanging habit, 60 days to maturity. Tolerates some shade. #23: Oak Leaf Lettuce, 8 inches high, not heat tolerant, 65 days to maturity.
This numbering technique also makes creating plant labels easier, should you choose to do so. I don't bother with labels because my spreadsheet tracks exactly where everything is planted, but when I did use labels, before computers, I also just gave each plant a number and kept more detailed records corresponding to each number in my files.
These days, my iPhone can read the seed packet to me, and since I order on the Internet, I have all that information in my email order receipt as well. This way I can make my own labels for my Ziploc bags of seeds. Before the Internet, I relied on readers or volunteers to acquire this information.
Sowing seeds by touch involves some tactile discrimination, similar to reading braille. Carefully empty a few seeds into your palm, lift out two or three, and sprinkle them around your square. Radishes, of course, take up much less space than a tomato, so you need to divide your square into a grid mentally. For example, I plant nine bush beans in one square, but only four lettuce plants.
The official square foot method — Google for the square foot foundation — has grids you can place over your squares to properly position seeds or plants. But since I've used this method for almost 40 years, I don't really need their grids to accurately space my plants.
Very fine seeds can be sprinkled too, if you mix them with sand or coffee grounds in a pepper shaker. But I use this method only if I want a haphazard bunching of wildflowers, because the more exact your spacing, the easier it will be for you to locate weeds before they take over.
Overhead sprinklers waste a great deal of water, though admittedly, they do save labor, but there will always be spots that don't get enough water, while other places get too much.
Many folks simply use a hose with a spray nozzle to water plants. This can be hard to aim accurately without vision, and you need to be careful not to wash soil away or drown little seedlings. It works fine for larger shrubs, but for small plants, I prefer a bucket with a dipper, such as an old sour cream container. I simply dip out water to empty into each square, after testing with my finger to see if the soil is dry. When I had a larger garden, and was also responsible for tending plants belonging to my sighted house-mate, I used soaker hoses — these have tiny holes drilled into them and can be strung around and in between plants to evenly water everything. Both these techniques save water and ensure all the water you use goes to your plants' roots. You can also buy drip irrigation kits with little plastic nozzles that you aim at each plant. Because I grow a lot of annual flowers and vegetables, I find these a pain to move around and fiddle with, so I no longer use them. But they are quite easy to assemble by touch.
For me, besides the pleasure of eating food directly from my own harvest, I also love fragrant plants. You don't need to visit a fragrance garden designed for the blind, and in fact you can grow a more varying collection in your own yard. The non-profits with public fragrance gardens must stick with mostly herbs, because flowering shrubs can be fussy, but oh, the fragrance they bring is heavenly. I love scented Pelargoniums which have fragrances ranging from lemon and chocolate to rose and lime. Some fragrant shrubs, of course, will need a large pot or raised bed of their own such as datura, Brugmansia, pittosporum, jasmine, daphne and mock orange. But you can also grow annual fragrant flowers, like night-scented stock or heliotrope. Or you can grow fragrant bulbs like freesia or tuberose. And if you grow real roses, get yourself a pair of elbow-length lambskin gloves and you will be impervious to thorns. I have found my own scented gardens provide a much richer aromatic experience than I've ever had in a so-called garden for the blind.
Should you ever despair of having a green thumb yourself, get a volunteer to help you scope out the trash dumpster in the back of a typical plant nursery. It's a great way to discover which plants will not grow in your area, and helps you realize that your microclimate and soil, not to mention your humidity and weather, will determine your success. Your thumb has nothing to do with it!