From the beginning

A Newer Beginning

2011-08-12T09:04:00.000-07:00

I woke up one day a couple weekends ago to find my boyfriend MIA. This was not of great concern to me as I was tired, and it was the weekend. Though after a few minutes of debating whether to laze about in bed or not I decided to go out back and greet him with morning breath and all. Not only was he not sitting on the back porch, he was in the yard moving the earth, FOR ME!
I knew I had found a good guy prior to this, but this confirmed my beliefs even more. I have heard people say "I love you so much I would move heaven and earth for you!" but I have never seen it in action before. I am sure at this point if I asked him to he would try and find a way to move the heavens for me as well.
My love knows how much I loved being in my garden and outside "playing in the dirt" and how much I have been missing it, so he decided to do something about it. He has taken a corner of the yard and is progressively getting it ready for us to have a garden out there. He has spent countless hours clearing the area, pulling weeds, and prepping the dirt.
This weekend there are plans to put down chicken wire to keep the gophers from digging up from underneath and ruining our plans of a beautiful garden. I am excited as I will have a garden I can go out to when I am feeling up to it, and if not I have quite a few hands available that I am sure will be willing to help.
In the side yard the kids also have a couple raised garden beds they are going to use to start their own gardens in.
This is so exciting for me to have everyone involved in something I love to do so much, and to have a replacement garden for the one I am having to give up. I already have a few seedlings yearning to stretch.

Evolution of my garden

2010-05-13T10:41:00.000-07:00

Over the next couple of weeks I spent sifting through compost and manure piles. I know what you are thinking that it shouldn't have taken that long. However I was only able to work in the garden for about 1/2 to an hour if I was lucky on most days I was there, and it was usually just me with a sifter. I would spend most of the time gathering what I needed the wheel barrell from up the hill, the shovel from wherever it had been discarded last - usually in the compost pile so that is helpful, and the sifter from one of the piles it was left by. I would then create little piles of sifted dirt and sifted compost in various spots on the plot, so I could go back before heading home and combine them together.

The sifter is basically a wood frame with some chicken wire on it. This is so we didn't have big chunks of coffee grounds, or lawn clippings in there that weren't fully composted yet. Of course I took an extra long time because I couldn't abide by the fact that I may be squishing some worms in there, so I would pile the compost or manure onto the sifter that was sitting on top of the wheel barrow and then pick through it to make sure I was able to pull any worms out and place them back to work. I know they are just worms and all that, and I am sure more than a couple got into my garden, but they can only help and I feel better about the garden thinking I did all I could to ensure there would be whole worms in there and in the piles than just worm chunks. The thing I love about the compost pile is that everyone seems to be pitching in on it, some Sundays when I am there I get to see many of the people that attend the church in front bring their little buckets of compost. And of course there are always coffee grounds aplenty from there as well. I was told the sheep manure we have there is brough over from the sheep farm next door, and I don't entirely remember if they said it was donated or not.

Finally I got most of it filled, though still not all of it because we are low on fill dirt and compost. I planted the two tomato plants I had been given, as they had been sitting there patiently in their pots since that first Saturday I had been out there. I figure I can plant and fill as I grow as most of my seedlings have been eagerly awaiting their new home. I was going to be very organized about it all and map out where I wanted everything placed, but have since changed my mind. I am just going to plant where it looks best to me and take care of the plants the best I can. In the past I have had tremendous luck with tomatoes, roses, lettuce, corn, snap peas, edamame, potatoes, etc. Everything has always been thrown together haphazardly and always against the advisement of other gardeners. One of the fellow gardeners was fearful when he saw me planting pumpins and squash so near where I was planting the strawberries and sunflowers. He said those two alone will take over my garden. This guy has never seen the small spaces I have crammed gardens into before and somehow they always work out. Here I have more room so I am optimistic. Though I am more worried about the carrots, never had good luck with those but we shall see, I am babying them for now.

From the Beginning

2010-04-30T10:39:00.000-07:00

As most of you know I have started my garden at a Community Garden. Most of this time I have been doing nothing but pulling weeds and sifting through the compost piles. This is a journal of the ups and downs of gardening.

The bed I am renting was full of weeds. I am not sure if most community gardens are set up this way but i kind of liked it. It is hard, yet refreshing work to know that I started this garden from scratch. It was absolutely hard work!

I showed up first there on a Saturday morning for a meeting of the gardeners, turns out there weren't as many of us as I had thought, there were only three other ladies there and I was the youngext by a good 30 years. It felt a little odd. Are there no young people that enjoy gardening? I found out that thus far they had only rented out 5 of the 18 spaces. Thus the small group. We went over out hopes, expectations and of course rules of the garden.

This is when the fun part began we headed out to the beds to try and get them into some sort of shape. There was a bed next to mine that looked just as bad, full of rocks and weeds, so it was decided we would work on mine and see how manageable we could get the weeds in the side bed.

Thinking it would be nice if it got rented and the new gardener wouldn't have to deal with as many weeds as I had to. The weeds weren't the biggest problem here though - the ground was so hard and so rocky it was hard to get them yanked out and to get rid of all the rocks. Thankfully I had the help of the head gardener as well as the sporadic help of my two monkeys. We used the borrowed shovel as well as buckets they conveniently had place everywhere.

After a few hours in the garden - I think about 4 we got all the weeds out, ok well most of the weeds, we were working with shovels and hands only here no nifty claw device or anything like that. so we got out the majority - leaving a few stubborn ones behind.

What a long exhausting day! The only reason I had went home so soon was because the kids were hungry. I was so naive about all the work involved in that bed that I had thought I would be able to escort some of my liners down that day to be planted. That was to be saved for another day. That Saturday all I wanted to do was take a cold shower - it was bloody hot out there - and sit by the pool as the kids found new ways to dangerously jump in.