Garden I – Ground Work

The garden is another huge task we’ve taken on recently. This year Melissa wanted to make the garden larger because last year she had no room between rows. So we dug out a perimeter around an area twice as large as before, and laid down the bricks. To my dismay, the new garden area contained the best grass in the entire yard. There are big sections in the front yard where the grass is nasty. I couldn’t let the good grass go to waste, so I laboriously transplanted all the sod. This backbreaking effort only reinforced our neighbor’s belief that I am completely crazy and predisposed to making the maximum effort for the minimum gain. After transplanting half of the grass we decided to stop because it was too much work. So we buried the remainder deep under the garden to become compost. This required digging several feet into the pure clay soil to ensure that the grass and weeds would never grow to the surface.
Melissa tried to improve the soil consistency by adding some manure (ewwww) to the clay, but it basically amounted to her trying to break apart huge sticky blobs of clay for some semblance of a nice looking garden soil – which wasn’t really accomplished. However, the lettuce, chard, broccoli and peas are planted. Melissa hopes to plant the beans and cucumber shortly and then the tomatoes and bell peppers when it gets a bit warmer.
Also this year everything was grown from seed. So the tomatoes, peppers and broccoli started early in small pots. It’s fun to see these little leaves popping up from the soil and grow into huge plants that we can eat from someday!