To make things grow
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Posted on April 26th, 2010 // filed under Life here in Farmland
The vegetable garden is my new obsession. This is the first of (what will probably be) many posts about it over the course of the coming summer.
This is dirt…my dirt…our dirt. It’s wonderful dirt, a mixture of the soil we trucked in for last year’s garden and the manure my horses have been faithfully producing all year long. It just astonishes and thrills me that poop+plants+sunshine+water = delicious vegetables.
I planted seeds in these two boxes on Friday night, before the rain came this weekend. The box on the left has snow peas and regular peas, and the one on the right is 2/3 lettuce and 1/3 green onions. In about 45 days, we’ll be having a lot of peas and salads.
Here’s a wider shot of our garden. It’s a work in progress to be sure. Not your average square of tilled earth with vegetables marching in soldier-straight rows. We garden in raised beds instead, which we find advantageous for a variety of reasons. This arrangement provides much better drainage than our gross heavy mucky clay topsoil, and makes it a lot easier for us to control the soil content. It’s also a lot easier to keep the weeds out, and having the plants off the ground a little makes it easier to get at them when it’s time to harvest the goodness they produce. The arrangement allows us to efficiently use this space on the hill next to our house, which would otherwise be pretty useless. I designed and built the four original boxes (the grey, weathered ones) last spring, setting the sides into the hill for that terraced effect, and I’m pretty darn proud of how they turned out. They are 12ft long and 4ft wide, good sized but allowing easy access to all the plants, and they cost about $20 each to assemble. As for the smaller boxes, a friend of Dad’s recently salvaged those from the trash for us thinking they’d burn great in our woodstove–which they would have–but instead we’re going to add a row of them to the far end of the garden and grow more stuff. 
The weekend was rainy, so we engaged in some indoor gardening of the plant-herb-seeds-in-pots variety. But we had to paint the pots first. Because it’s a well-known fact that herbs grow better in pretty pots than they do in plain ones. 
Everybody got involved.
We had so much fun and they all turned out so creative and beautiful!
These are 7-year-old Brycen’s pots.
Brenna made this very cool one with day on one side and night on the other. What a great idea.
Two more of Brenna’s.
Ethan did this cool dragon pot.
He also did this ridiculously awesome Mario pot.
Braelynn’s sweet flower and bug pots.
I painted this birdie.
My other pot, a patchwork design.
Aaaand, Jamison’s work of art.
I was really impressed with the kids’ artistry and it was a fun thing to do together on a boring Saturday. When the plants grow, we will have basil, tarragon, cilantro, chives, parsley, oregano, and….um….a couple of other things I forget. Eventually, when the weather gets warmer, we’ll probably transplant them to one of the garden boxes so they have more room to grow.
It’s going to be a very delicious summer…stay tuned.
