As a certified retirement community, Vicksburg has become home to a nice group of residents who formerly lived in other parts of the country.

Linda and Bob Baudo moved here from McAllen, Texas, after a chance reading of an advertisement featuring a home for sale by owner in The Vicksburg Post caught their eye during a night’s stay as they were passing through Vicksburg.

“We wanted to live by a lake when we retired” Linda Baudo explained. We read the description of a home for sale in Lake Park Estates, went out to see it later that day and purchased it the next. Six years have passed and Linda Baudo, one of the new Master Gardener interns, and her husband have converted much of their property into garden space for ornamentals and vegetables.

Their lot is not large but could pose a challenge to many. They transformed a huge mound of dirt at one end of the frontyard into an interesting set of tall raised flower beds with a walkway winding through it.

Fairy roses, which are some of the only original plantings to the yard, day lilies, rudbeckias, cone flowers, spirea, liatris, dianthus, Homestead Purple verbena, creeping jenny, dahlias, columbine, yarrow, coreopsis, Autumn Joy sedum, gladiolas, elephant ears and a small red Japanese maple now grow and provide bright color to what had been an awkward area of their landscape.

A stand of trees can be seen behind this unusual bed with three compost bins constructed in the shade which overlooks the lake. Baudo said that they use lots of compost.

Her husband built sleighs out of thin PVC pipe and chicken wire which he lays across the compost bins. Green and dry materials are placed on top of the sleighs just as they are in a regular compost pile but the Baudos can lift each sleigh to allow air into the piles without having to turn them. The smaller particles will sift through the wire as the material decomposes and can be dug out from below the sleigh if needed in the garden before the pile is completely decomposed.

They lost a giant red oak from this stand of trees after they moved in and started renovating the garden. They discovered Mississippi artist Dayton Scoggins from Sanderson (Artistry in Wood) who was demonstrating his talent at a festival in Rolling Fork.

They went to see his work and talked him into coming to Vicksburg to transform several huge pieces of their tree trunk into unique works of art for their garden. In 11⁄2 days using a chain saw to carve, he created a memorial set of trees where the original stood, a bear, a turtle and a heron which stand as guards lakeside.

Scoggins’ work really adds something special to this garden site. He’s the same artist who did the wildlife carvings along the beach highway in Gulfport-Biloxi after Katrina.

The house and patio sit well above sloping ground leading down to the lake. In the sunnier section of the backyard the Baudos have constructed 11 raised vegetable garden beds 28 feet by 14 feet. There is just enough space in between the beds to allow them to walk through to pick vegetables and work the soil for planting from outside the beds.

The walkways are covered with astro turf, a surface which makes it easy to walk through the beds and suppresses weeds and grass. The soil they use in these beds is a third vermiculite, a third peat moss and a third compost and is a Square Foot Gardening method recipe. Throughout the growing cycle, they add more compost and a little fertilizer to the beds to maintain fertility.

Asparagus, sugar snap peas and various greens grow in the raised beds during the cooler months and cucumbers, onions, tomatoes, peppers, green beans and squash in the summer. Hyacinth bean, zinnias, marigolds, basil and coneflowers grow among the vegetables to bring in bees and foil insect pests. They follow an organic regime as much as possible.

The rest of the backyard gets little direct sunshine allowing shade-loving plants such as azaleas, coral bells, hostas, ferns including Japanese painted fern, bugleweed, Lenten rose, acuba, striped airplane plants, begonias and red impatiens to flourish. More herbs, kalancola and numerous succulents grow in pots and in a former birdbath converted into a container on the patio.

Baudo has found success in growing some of her perennials from seed including coneflowers. She purchased a pot of coneflowers, a Mississippi native, three years ago. After the blooms died back, she harvested the seed from the cones, placed them in a small paper bag after they were completely dried out and froze them all winter. She planted them in containers the following spring and now has coneflowers growing throughout the garden, prodigy of that original plant.

She has done the same with rudbeckias, zinnias, Shasta daisies and dahlias. Many of the newer hybrid seeds may not come true from seed collected in this manner but she has had good luck so far with seeds from older cultivars.

Vicksburg may not have been on their original list of retirement communities but they seem to have adapted beautifully to living in the Red Carpet City.

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Miriam Jabour, a Master Gardener and Master Flower Show judge, has been active in the Openwood Plantation Garden Club for over 35 years. Write to her at 1114 Windy Lake Drive, Vicksburg MS 39183.