House Work

I decided when we bought our house last year, that I wanted to expand a garden that already existed in the backyard so that I could have a huge veggie garden. I didn't think it would be that big of a project: get rid of a little bit of sod, till, sink the boarder, and voila we have a garden twice the size it was.

Haha, if only it had been that simple. On Friday after work we decided to start on the project and get the sod torn out. I pulled out the existing boarder, and started cutting the sod with a shovel.

About half way through I hit something, but assumed it was probably a rock. Turns out, it was my main Comcast feed to the house. Comcast, in all their brilliance, dropped the main feed to my house less than 1" below the ground surface. When the sod was removed, the feed lay right on top of the dirt. Thanks Comcast. Turns out there are two other cables that are too close to the surface. Now, we've got to dig 1 foot deep trenches for all of the cables. So, instead of taking Saturday to till, and lay the boarder, we dug trenches. During our trench digging, we also discovered that our soils is solid clay about 4" down. We also found a variety of strange buried objects such as tar, shingles, cables, nails, entire empty bags of mulch, plastic, etc. It was fun excavating at first to see what things were. Then, after digging trenches, Ryan decided that he thought adding a pathway would be nice. I agreed, so we ran up to Lowes purchased some pavers and some sandstone. We were able to level and lay the pavers before it got too dark.

Sunday, we began early in the morning (had to be at the 'rents for Easter Dinner at 5:00). We laid the rubber bumper to hold in the sandstones, dumped and leveled the sandstones, sunk the brick boarder, and then coated the dirt with gypsum and lime to help break up the clay and give us more fertile soil. Then, Ryan got to till!

Even though it took WAY more work than we anticipated at the beginning, we ended up with the most beautiful garden. We more than doubled it's size; it's now 8.5' X 26'. I now have a ton of room to grow all of the veggies I want! And without further adieu, here is the finished product:

































I'm planning to grow some green beans, cucumbers, heirloom tomatoes, a variety of peppers, lettuce, onions, and strawberries.
In the rear of the backyard I'm going to start growing some wild blackberries too, yum! I can't wait to start planting at the beginning of May!!!

In other news: Today I received a Lowes gift card as a wedding present from my Great Aunt & Uncle who will not be able to make it to the wedding! It was so fun to get a gift early, and a very, very, very useful gift. Ryan and I are just at the beginning stages of working on our yard...I'm sure we'll make about 1000 trips to Lowes/Home Depot before the summer is out!