Gardening is becoming a great team exercise for us, as she possess quite a lot of garden knowledge and I find myself wanting to wear my muscles out after a week in the office. So she does the thinking and the light work, and I enjoy the heavy lifting.
Lately that's meant I've gotten to build two raised beds for us and fill them. Home Depot had some great 4x4 beams for us, and I was able to screw them together quite easily. After a little tilling, it was off to the dump to pick up some free compost.
Our dump has a special place for yard clippings, which they let sit for four years and then freely give back to us as compost. Shoveling it into trash cans in the back of my Volvo made me miss the old days back at the peat mine a bit. By the fourth load, the inside of the Volvo looked about like the inside of Uncle Randy's truck, and my fingernails looked about like Dad's do after a good day of surveying. It was almost like being home again.
The bed looked good filled with compost, but that won't grow vegetables all that well. The experts around here say to amend it with the one thing you can always find on The Cape: sand. I was able to find some spare sand in a few natural locations, and now it's in a good situation to both nourish and drain.
Here's the final product:
Emily has some young tomato plants growing, waiting for a little more warmth before she puts them in their new home. Beyond that, we have peas, beans, lettuce, carrots, and squash planned. We hope we'll one day be eating of our bounty!
This is so fun! I was totally talking to Raymond today about seeing if our new complex would let me put a raised bed in our yard...I'm gonna say that their answer is probably no, but I hope you guys blog more about this garden so that I can garden vicariously through you guys! :)
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