Garden!

Well spring certainly has taken its sweet time getting here this year. It snowed on May 31st. Seriously? Doesn't the weatherman know that's our second engagementaverssary? We were supposed to celebrate with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich picnic in the park, which is how this whole marriage thing started, but we opted to keep our bottoms dry and stayed home. But do we let bipolar weather keep us from finally being able to plant a garden? You bet your compost we don't!

A nice man in my parent's bishopric has an extra plot of land that he's not using. He said it was ours to tear up and plant as we chose. I bet he wasn't expecting us to go dumpster diving and cover his nice green lawn with our trash.

It all started when we found this library book about "Weedless Gardening". Supposedly, if you put down newspaper or cardboard and cover it with compost, it'll kill the grass/weeds and turn them into nice nutritious soil. No tilling, no weeding, just lots of cardboard. So that's what we did. We spent several days gathering and spreading and watering our cardboard farm. Then we shoveled some muck onto the beds and made grass clipping pathways. It turned out to be a lot of work, especially since the only way to transport compost was in garbage bags that had to be thrown over the privacy fence separating the garden plot from my mom's parking lot. We got yelled at by some neighbors who thought we were dumping bag after bag of trash onto someone else's property. (They couldn't see us because of said privacy fence.)

Here's the semi-finished product:

It's nice that Joseph can't crawl yet. He just sits on his cardboard box and watches us...for about 10 minutes and then he's had enough. It will be easier for him to entertain himself when he's mobile, but harder for us to work. There's an empty pool back there that's a disaster waiting to happen. I think we need to invest in a playpen.

Once we finally got our beds covered with compost, we realized that it wasn't deep enough to hold the moisture that we needed to dissolve the cardboard. That meant more shoveling and moving compost. We ended up borrowing a rototiller and tilling up 4 of the beds anyway. I'm not convinced that weedless gardening saved us any time or trouble in the end.

Here we are pilfering rocks from the river. Our cardboard kept blowing away every time there was a storm. We weighed it down with some heavy rocks (which also had to be heaved over that 7 foot over the fence).

These pictures are from over a month ago. Since then we've planted corn, chard, arugula, lettuce, beets, kohlrabi, tomatoes, peppers, green beans, basil, parsley, peas, squash, cucumbers, marigolds and petunias. And then it rained, and blew, and snowed, and hailed, and they cut down a tree and threw all the branches on our lettuce bed. Did I mention that, on the way to cut down that tree, they drove a huge truck over our peas? It'll be a miracle if we get a harvest at all.