Monday, June 4, 2012

Day 8 - My Green Thumb Hurts

Just a short post today. Everything hurts, right down to my green thumbs and fingertips! But I want to share a few pictures of my garden progress. It's slow going, but hopefully, it will be worth it when I can maybe eat some vegetables in a few months. Gosh, that doesn't sound very promising!

I'd like to quickly add that I hate grass and also Home Depot, who have made renting gas powered yard tools cost prohibitive. I'm not wasting my extra $150 this month on renting a damn rototiller.

Here we go:


This is just a small sample of weeds like those we spent all day Sunday pulling. We had to pull tons of weeds like this to make room for the new garden. Note: My husband pulled all the weeds at the back of the property last fall AND put down weed killer. And this is what we get in the Spring. Ridiculous! They are almost as tall as the fence. If our neighbors behind us didn't have just as much of a weed problem, I'm sure they'd hate us.


On the left, you can see the weeds are still there. There's easily another 100 feet of weeds remaining, mocking my gardening efforts. They have every intention of eating any compost I put down for my vegetables. Once my garden is complete, I have every intention of pulling them all out by their necks.

 Pictured here, you can see part of the space I have carved out (literally) for my garden. See all those chunks of sod? That's what I did all day today. Me and Mr. Shovel. It occurs to me that the person who ultimately decided the rototiller rental was too expensive is NOT the person doing the digging. I always knew he was smart.

Last note: Along the back, I have some old pieces of wood recovered from the sloppy garden that the previous owners "maintained" 10 years ago on the other side of the backyard. I'm using it to create a border. Between the beams and the fence, I'll be planting flowers to dress up my veggie garden! They will benefit from water running down from the mound in the middle, my "raised garden", where I'll plant deep rooting veggies like carrots.

Panning to the right, you can see where I have continued the outline of my garden. Working on an angle like this will important for mowing purposes later. (Hubs and I hate to mow around sharp corners.) I found a little clever gardening tip online and used it today - I used my garden hose to layout the curving edge of my garden bed and then followed the line of it with my straight edger tool. Much easier than eyeballing it!

I picked this spot in the northeast corner of the property. Everyone seems to have an opinion on the best place for a garden. (I should stop visiting all the online gardening blogs. They just stress me out.)

What's important to note in this picture (besides the shadow of your faithful former couch potato in her baseball hat in the lower left) is how much I still have left to dig up. It may not seem like much - but on the other end of a long day of digging, this seems like a huge amount of work to do. Tomorrow, I'll finish digging this up. Hopefully, the other grass pieces will be dried out enough to shake and deposit in lawn bags for the yard pickup on Friday morning. Then I'll retest my soil PH...possibly add some lime....till in the compost (free from our city)...and finally start mapping out my planting strategy!

Just for kicks, I took a picture today of the self-mulching tree I blogged about last week. I spent some time here today, taking breaks from my digging. The birds seemed a little put out, but ventured over to the other side of the property to eat all the worms I was uncovering over there. In the upper right corner, you can see the delights that await me - my flower bed has run amuck. It's been a couple years since I pruned anything back. But one thing at a time. My tendency is to jump right out there and expect a big project to be done in a day. My garden will take a while before it's producing, and while my veggies are cooking in the soil, I'll have plenty of time to tackle everything else. Really wishing I'd spent a little less time watching TV and a little more keeping up with the yardwork. Homeownership is expensive and time consuming, isn't it?



1 comment:

  1. "Homeownership is expensive and time consuming, isn't it?" It certainly is.
    --Hubs

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