Garden Prep

Someday, I will have a huge sunny spot where I can have my whole vegetable garden in one place. Right now, the only spot that sort of qualifies is my front yard but, since we hope to sell this house sometime in the not-to-distant future, I haven't dug it all up yet, since I suppose the next owner might not be quite so keen on having such a large and visible garden. So, I make do with what I have and slowly expand each year in ways that I hope will not only increase my yield but also add to the beauty and value of our home.

Last year, I put in a brand new bed across the entire front of the lawn, three feet by seventy feet. It housed my tomatoes, cucumbers, peas, lettuce, kale, chard and basil. Half of the bed I removed sod and dug up and the other half I did in a modified "lasagna" fashion - laying down newspaper, then old leaves, some wood ash and covering with a mix of purchased manure and topsoil. It worked so well that I plan to start all my new gardens in the same way. During the winter (since we hardly had any snow) whenever we cleaned out our woodstove I dumped the ashes on the gardens. As we started garden prep earlier this week, this is what the front garden looked like. You can see the contrast between the lasagna bed on the left and the dug bed on the right.

We started with three trash cans full of old manure scraped from the paddock at our friends' house where our horses live. I spread one can over the entire dug side of the front bed. Here's what it looked like after that! Ahhh, much better.

Then, Clara helped me measure off for a new watering system, aka jugs in the ground. I plant my tomatoes close, every 2 feet, trying to make the most of a small space and reduce weed growth at the same time. We marked off every four feet, in between where the tomatoes will be so that there will be a milk jug for every two plants.

We buried our milk jugs (which I had previously poked full of holes) and put sticks in them so they'll be easy to find this summer after I've built up the soil some more and our plants are getting tall and bushy!

This is what it looked like when we were done. Clara was having a blast making birthday cakes!

Then, I started on the new bed that is going in front of the house and joining up with my existing garden on the side of the house. First, I put down 3 layers of newspaper, hosing as I went, to kill the grass and block weed growth. Here, you can see I had started on the second step: a layer of old leaves from last fall.

Once all the newspaper was covered with several inches of leaves, I used my remaining two garbage cans of manure to cover the entire bed. When I came back to take pictures, I found this little guy crawling happily across the new bed. Isn't he stunning?!

Here's a peek at the new bed. I had to work around some existing daffodils that are coming up but it turned out pretty well. After this I also took 80 lbs of topsoil and spread it over the top of the bed so I can go ahead and plant here within the next couple of weeks. I know some lettuce will be going in here and probably some cucumbers - I need to get cracking on my garden plan!