On the first weekend in May, Husband worked super-hard and got our yard into great shape! One of his projects was to prepare the garden (isn’t he a great guy?).
This is what it looked like “before.” We’d dumped all the leaves that we’d raked from the yard into the garden to cover it for the winter. Husband has decided that he will not do that again! It made tilling it (by hand) extremely difficult, and there are big chunks of partially decomposed leaves throughout the soil now.
This is an oh-so-glamorous shot of our compost bin. We ended up “cold-composting.” All last growing season, we added material to the compost bin. When the growing season ended and we deconstructed the garden, we stopped adding to the bin and just let it sit. We didn’t turn the contents at all. So when Husband opened the bin, we found a layer of nice compost at the bottom, but there was still material above it that hadn’t transformed. Not a bad result for basically no work! Husband mixed the layer of compost soil into the garden, and left the other material to start this year’s cold compost.
After the back-breaking work of tilling the garden and working in the compost soil, Husband let me plant my (rather pathetic) seedlings, at my request. (Side note: it was way harder than I expected to be kneeling on the ground and working around my big ol’ belly, haha!)
And here are those sprouts, above. The leftmost column are the peppers, next are the Best Boy, the three in the middle-right column are what is left of the Jelly Bean sprouts (sad), and the Fourth of July sprouts are in the far right column.
I direct-sowed cucumber and zucchini seeds, as well!
Now for some not-very-illuminating photos of the planted garden:
Garden planted and mulched!
By the way, you can see our rain barrel all set up again to the left of the garden. Thanks to some absolutely crazy rain storms recently, it is nice and full already, and we used it for all of our garden watering as we planted! When Husband set it up a couple weeks ago, he added a second layer of cinderblock to give it additional height, which hopefully will result in more water pressure when we hook up the soaker hose later.
cucumber seeds planted at base of trellises, pepper plants in the three middle spots, and zucchini seeds planted in the two foreground spots.
Best Boy seedlings in the back row, Fourth of July seedlings in the front row.
I also direct-sowed a packet of mixed herb seeds (basil, dill, marjoram, and savory) that I got as a freebie last summer at the county fair. We’re using the box on the porch railing for this, and I”m going to try to be much more reliable about watering it this year! 😉
Finally, my little girl has been SUPER excited about the garden. All spring long, she has been talking about helping in the garden. So Husband and I decided that she should have a container “garden” of her own; the rabbit-proof fencing makes it difficult for her to get into the main garden!
We picked out a compact cherry tomato plant at our local Home Depot, and she helped us to plant it in one of our large terra cotta pots.
I’m so excited for her to help take care of it and watch it grow!!
Vegetablog 