New Face, New Topic

For those of you who have an RSS feed to this site, or happen to actually check in still hoping that I just was asleep at the wheel and am suddenly going to post pictures of a nearly completed home, I'm back, and with a new head of steam on a new topic.

Gardening. Thats right, the family and I are going to attempt to grow a whole mess 'o vegetables (and a little fruit) this summer in the good old city.

Since we are unable to build on the other lot, we have decided to use a good portion of the backyard as a vegetable garden. It seemed like the logical thing to do with the volume of fresh fruits and vegetables we eat, so we decided to go for it.

So, I took the above plot of grass, rented a rototiller from Home Deport, and went to work. The key to this was that we had to take soil that most likely hadnt been cultivated in 50 years, and turn it into viable soil. This meant rototilling the top layer and raking the grass off. Since the ground was fairly hard, I had to do this a second time to get the balance of the big pieces of grass. Once that was done I then went to work tilling as deeply as I could in parrallel lines doing one pass in each direction (east/west - north/south).

Once I was done with those 6 passes at the ground I went through and cut out what roots weren't ripped out. This area had quite a few roots, and it was tedious tilling and cutting all of these out. I also picked out any pieces of wood, rock, or random loose debris (this included a marble, a small plastic toy horse, a large metal hook and bolt, and a spark plug).

I went back to the Home Depot (twice) to get bags of Peat and Organic garden soil. First, I put roughly a 1" layer of peat on the whole area. Then I made a pass in each direction, making sure to take my time so the soil and peat were good and mixed. Once I had this done, I spread another inch of organic gardening soil on top of that. I then made very slow deliberate passes at the ground to mix as much as possible. At this point, the soil was so soft and deep that the rototiller was working at its fullest possible depth, and probably not hitting hard ground at the bottom.

Once I made the last pass, i then raked the dirt back into one level plane while cleaning up the rest of the loose grass, rocks, and wood that was coming to the top through the process of mixing everything up.

Next up is going to be edging the garden and deciding the best way to make furrows for growing the vegetables as well as how the heck to keep all of the local animals out of the garden as well.