The Green Fig Tree

Vegetable Garden

So last year I set out with a plan to create a large vegetable garden in our backyard, with four raised boxes that were 8 ft x 4 ft.  We bought all the wood, and I even bought seeds to plant from Irish Eyes Garden Seeds.  However, the project got started too late (end of April) and required too much work in too short a period of time, and it was just too much altogether for us to get done.  This year, especially after reading books like In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan, and seeing the Oscar-nominated documentary Food, Inc., I was really motivated to do something about creating a vegetable garden in our yard.  Andy and I discussed it, and it was decided that we would scale down the project to two 8 ft x 4 ft boxes, plus various stand-alone pots for things like mint that might take over the garden.

I called the seed company and they told me that most of the seeds I had purchases last year, due to keeping them in the house (cool and dry), should be useable, and I purchased a few more seeds to plant things I have used in cooking this year that I had never used at this time last year (like eggplant and zucchini).  So, two weeks ago I went to Green Mama’s Organic Gardening Center and learned about what I needed to do to make my nasty clay soil productive, and purchased a lot of compost, lava sand and organic fertilizers, as well as some herb plants that are more difficult to grow from seeds.  I started planting indoors (with Sophia’s help, of course) tomatoes, some herbs, jalapenos and bell peppers.  Last weekend Andy built the boxes to go into the yard, and we worked together to till up the clay soil, add all the Green Mama purchases and mix it together well.

Finally, today, we were able to start planting outside in the boxes.  My dad came and helped, which made it go real fast.  We tied off the boxes into 1 ft x 1 ft sections, to keep everything organized (sort-of like square-foot gardening, but not as strict), and started planting.  The list includes green beans, eggplant, cucumber, zucchini, onions, romaine lettuce, spinach, a gourmet lettuce mix, carrots, as well as the herb plants that were bought.  The tomatoes and basil and other plants that were started indoors will go out in two or three weeks, once they have reached the proper height, and I still have sugar snap peas to plant, which can’t go into the ground for a few weeks.  However, I am super excited that this grand scheme is finally coming to be a reality.  It is so thrilling to see the tiny basil leaves poking up, or the teeny stem that will eventually become a tomato plant.  I have posted pics of the journey, and I will post more pics as things start to grow.