After I read Barbara Kingsolvers's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle last year, I was more determined than ever to have a garden. If you haven't read it, check it out. She and her family decided to live for a year on only what they could grow and buy at their local farmers market, or from neighboring farmers. They wanted to see how much it would cost as opposed to shopping at a grocery store, and they also wanted to live sustainably--almost all of the food at stores is shipped from hundreds of miles away, costing money for gas and polluting the air too. Kingsolver wanted to get in touch with the earth. She wanted to really see where food comes from (the ground, not a cardboard box or a tin can), and get creative with recipes for using whatever was in season at the time. One thing I learned from her was that if your neighbors are growing zucchinni, don't bother. By the end of the summer, they'll be leaving bags of it outside your door to get rid of it!
My plan of attack for the garden was simple: buy the plants and figure out where to put them later. Actually, I hadn't seriously planned to have a garden this year because of the cat problem, but when I saw those rows of young plants at Farmington Gardens (our local nursery), I couldn't resist. I started small, only two tomato plants, but took Michael back later and loaded up a wagon (the nursery has red wagons for people to put their plant selections in--I think that's the coolest idea!) with more tomatoes, cucumbers and two kinds of zucchini--our neighbors aren't super friendly, so we probably won't have to worry about them trying to pawn off extra veggies on us! Besides, the tag said they're easy to grow, and easy is good for beginning gardeners like me. :) We also got a pumpkin! It's a French variety, so of course I couldn't resist it, and I think it'll be fun to watch it grow and see how big it gets by Halloween.
As Michael stood by at the nursery watching me load plant after plant into our wagon, he asked me where I planned to put them. I said that I thought I could do a container garden--buy some really big plastic flower pots and fill them with veggies. He reminded me that the cucumbers and zucchini would need room to spread out. My crestfallen face must have softened his heart, because he said, "Well, maybe we can build a garden and fence it off to keep the cats out." Hooray! I was back in business!
Luckily, Memorial Day weekend was coming up, and we'd have a couple of days to get our garden set up. We decided to put it on the south side of the house, in the exact spot where we had piled the old flooring from the kitchen--our plan for the huge pile was to dispose of it little by little in our garbage can each week. So first we had to move the pile of plywood and broken tiles, sodden from recent rain, to a new place a few feet away from our intended garden.
Here's Michael hard at work moving the pile of debris
I pulled up the weeds and we were down to bare soil. Because the folks who built our house back in 1994 decided to go cheap and use clay landfill to make our yard, our bare soil meant thick, hard clay which turns to mud when wet. Definitely not your first choice for a garden, but we could deal with it. We turned to our local Home Depot and rented a mid-size rototiller in order to break up the clay enough to get some real soil in it
The rototiller. We were probably stretching its limits, with our tough clay and should've opted for the full-size model, but it did the job
Hard work for Michael!
The next step was building the fence. We had 3 foot chicken wire from Home Depot, and some wooden stakes to build the fence. It went up pretty quickly and then all that was left to do was dig holes for each plant, fill them with potting soil, and nestle the baby plants in. There were three rusty plant cages left over from the lady who lived here before us, which we used around our tomato plants. They'll definitely need the support as they get bigger.
Pounding in the stakes--notice the freshly-moved pile of flooring debris in the background.
Stretching out the chicken wire
The finished product! Yay!
The baby plants with a garden angel in the background to help them grow.
Now we just need some sunshine to make those tomatoes!
