Building a garden

When I was a kid--maybe between the ages of 10 and 15--I remember going out to help pick vegetables from Grandma Ives' big garden on her farm in Iowa.  She would grow green beans, sweet corn, strawberries, rhubarb, and other "strange Grandma foods".  I thought rhubarb was really gross until I had rhubarb pie for the first time.  But the green beans were my favorite. You could eat them straight off the plant!  So what if they were a little dirty?  You can eat as many as you want, there's like a million of them out here!  This is a fun memory.

This post is just a fun story about me building a mini garden in the back yard of my new house.

The back yard in our rented house has mostly clover and weeds covering the ground, so I didn't feel bad digging up a 4 foot by 8 foot area.  A few days ago my friend Jason came over and helped me to get this going.  First we picked out some lumber for the border and some soil to supplement the garden.

We started by nailing together a 4'x8' wooden frame out of some lumber, and then marking the outline of that frame with some stones, to guide our digging. Then we began to dig up the "grass" within that area.

Next we took a break and ate some delicious toasted tuna salad sandwiches for lunch.  This project took about 5 hours to complete in all.  After lunch, we dug down about a foot into the ground, to loosen up the soil and get some oxygen in there.

 

Finally we put down the wooden frame, and filled back in the dirt we had piled off to the side, mixing in a nutrient-rich bag of store-bought soil.

This project has only costed about $25 so far, but we haven't planted anything yet.  Jason is the expert on gardens, and so I'm relying on his expertise to know how to do this next phase.  We want to grow exotic tomatoes, zucchini, okra, basil, and, of course, green beans! :)