Monday, June 2, 2008

I can't believe I'm doing this...

Well I figured since this is a family blog maybe I (Tim) should do my part to contribute and get in on the blogging craze at the same time. Anyway, I must be getting old, because I never thought in a million years that I would ever be interested in making a garden. I spent enough tortuous days helping my mom in her garden when I was a kid that it never occurred to me that the desire hadn't been completely eradicated from my soul. I guess even those BACKBREAKING, HOT summer days of rototilling, digging postholes, weeding, etc. couldn't compete when the whole "be prepared" bit finally decided to hit home for me. So I decided to try this squarefoot gardening thing. It ended up costing us more money than I wanted but hopefully it will require almost zero labor to come.

I built this wooden frame first. The chicken wire cage thing is to keep the rabbits out and can easily be lifted off the top of the frame.



Then I covered the bottom with landscaping cloth, and then proceeded to build our own soil (one part peat moss, one part compost, and one part vermiculite). Then we planted a bunch of different stuff, one thing in each sqare. I've told myself that if this garden doesn't produce a whole farm's worth of veggies, I'm never doing it again, but I hear that this is one of the easiest ways to get a whole lot of harvest with hardly any effort. The setup was hard but since then we havent done a single thing to it (it's been raining here every other day or so so we haven't even had to water), and things are starting to sprout! I can see a tasty, organic-vegetable filled future for our family! After one week of doing absolutely nothing, this is what it looked like (except for the tomato plant; we bought it like that):



And the next day (today):



I hope soon we have more veggies than we know what to do with!

2 comments:

Jeff Hamm said...

We've had to put lot's of work (weeding!) into ours, but hopefully it bears fruits and veggies!

Mindy said...

Did you guys do the squarefoot thing too?