How Does Your Garden Grow- Food Garden

Everything is green and the days are getting longer.  And although that creates a bit of havoc on bedtime, it is so nice to feel the warm sun on our faces as we play outside or to open the windows and let the breezes and fresh air into a house that now seems closed up for too long.

We built our garden bed on Saturday and planted on Sunday.  Our backyard consists of clay and rocks, so a raised garden bed is definitely the better choice.  We put it all together using 4x4x6’s and 6 inch wood screws.  Then Arnie proceeded to move 5 yards of dirt into the garden, while I raked it through and evened it out.  The boys played in the dirt- digging in it, moving it, crawling all over it.  We had a wonderfully exhausting day outside.  Sunday we planted.  We managed to get quite a bit in a 12x12 space.  We planted 3 kinds of tomatoes, squash, cantaloupe, sweet potatoes, green beans, beets, jalapeños and green peppers along with basil and oregano.  The beets, green beans and cantaloupe we are starting from seed, while the rest are organic transplants from a local nursery.

Hayden is thrilled with it.  His face lights up when he talks about our vegetables, as if the plants are his friends.  And since we’ve been reading Peter Rabbit, he of course talks about how Asia might have to keep the bunnies away so they don’t steal our vegetables.  Yesterday he asked if our seeds had come up yet.  I wish I’d planted something that sprouted a bit sooner so he would be rewarded earlier, but everything is 10-21 days, so he will have to wait.  We had a much smaller garden in Memphis, but he was too young to really take part in it.  This year it will be wonderful to watch him make the connection between the earth and our food.  I, like Hayden, do hope our visiting bunny friends from last year don’t take too much a liking to our garden.

Spring has sprung and while I’m very behind in my house cleaning, it has been wonderful to just let go and spend time outside with the boys.  This Saturday will be a different story, as I’m planning to try out some freezer cooking.  I plan to cook or put together 14 meals for the freezer.  It’s a bit intimidating, but the benefits if it works will be completely worth it.

The rest of the week will be filled with coloring eggs, making an Easter tree and focusing on why we celebrate the holiday.

How Does Your Garden Grow?

Moving into the new house at the end of May, I purposely didn’t plant a garden.  I knew life would be too busy and settling in to the inside of the house more important.  But now I’m itching to get some compost in the ground and prep it for the spring.  I want to have a garden next year, and my thoughts are to do the hard prep work this fall, let the compost sit over the winter and then come spring… viola! Planting time!  Of course I’m completely an amateur gardener, so learning what to do in a new state is a bit intimidating, especially since I only had 3 small garden beds at our old place.

The main problem is, we live at the top of a hill that has lots of large granite rocks (read: boulders) in the ground all through the yard.  In addition our dirt isn’t, well, dirt.  Its Georgia red clay.  How do I till that?  Without a rotatiller? Ok, that’s three problems, not one.

The debate is- raised beds or work with what I have?  Raised beds would probably be easier, but the size of the garden I want hardly makes that economical.  But working with what we have, well I don’t know much about how stuff grows in red clay.  Especially vegetables, so if we have to do lots of supplementing to the soil that might not be practical either. 

On Friday we went to the library and I picked up several books on Georgia gardening and might get a soil testing kit to send to the state for soil analysis.  Hopefully both will shed some light on how to make my soil produce or help me make the decision to do a huge raised be garden instead. 

I’ll certainly post pictures once we decide what to do and start the work.