first weekend of april

daffodil, norway spruce, lettuce, lettuce growing lots of different places, italian heirloom tomato plants are looking bigger, and a dandelion green salad*

*Dandelion greens are packed with vitamins, but they can be bitter. A friend recommended mixing in hard boiled egg to cut through the bitterness; I also added chopped almonds, some of our oven-dried tomatoes from last year's harvest and then we poured a sweet homemade dressing on top. Yum!

lots of changes in the garden

Last weekend, we took advantage of the nice weather and got to work: harvesting seeds, picking veggies, taking down the old fence posts, and forming one more raised bed in the back part of the lot that had been behind the old fence.

On the left are some lettuce seed stalks. I bundled these together along with the sunflower stalks (picture on right), covered these bundles with netting and hung them on our back porch to collect the seeds.

Our pepper plants are finally producing. Anyone know of anything good to make with lots and lots of peppers? David made pickled peppers last year with my family's huge lot of peppers...I'm craving more of a pepper relish...any good recipe suggestions?
Of course, we have our weekly haul of tons of tomatoes (we've canned over 40 jars of sauce so far!). And last, but not least - I collected basil seeds in the brown lunch bag.


Meanwhile, David got to work on the old fence posts - he used a pruning saw to cut these down.

We then used the same steps that we had with the other raised beds. We put down cardboard, formed the keyhole bed, and filled in with soil, cover crop seeds, and finally covered all of it with straw.

we think it turned out really nice!

This is the view from the back corner of our lot.

The view from the front.
The view from the middle of the lot.
View from our second floor window.

Before and After: The top left picture was taken last summer. The bottom left picture was taken at the beginning of this summer and the picture on the right was taken this past weekend.

We are really happy with how it is shaping up!

More Raised Beds

Here's another big post to get us caught up to yesterday's work in the garden. (I should also mention that this post is being co-written by David AND Rebecca.)

In anticipation of our second truckload of soil, we again spread out cardboard to smother the weeds. Then the big day came for the truck to arrive.

We thought we'd include some pictures of the truck delivery, since the size of the truck was so ridiculous compared to the houses on our street. We also thought our nephews, who like trucks, might enjoy seeing the pictures.


We knew the pile of dirt would cover up the path and cardboard we had set up, but we didn't have much of a choice since the lot is so compact. Later on, we had to dig out the path that had been covered by the giant pile of dirt.


We spent almost an entire day shoveling dirt into the beds on the front end of the property.



Yesterday, we were able to plant annuals. We were surprised that we were this far along. This past winter, while we were imagining what the garden would look like, we didn't anticipate having the raised beds with annuals and cover crops planted by mid-May. We are experimenting this summer with interplanting vegetables and flowers. The theory is that mixing several different plants together is beneficial.


Under all that straw, we scattered a blend of cover crop seeds. I think we'll save the info on the cover crops for another post, though.


Here are some awesome aerial shots taken from our second story window. You can see the keyhole beds have been filled with annual flowers and veggies.

And below, you can see the soon-to-be-demolished fence. Our property line is about 13 feet beyond the old fence (with the open gate). That's our neighbor's table with chairs out there on their side.

Reclamation

When we started work on our garden, we didn't know what was in the ground. We still don't. As Rebecca said, most of our lot consists of two basements that were allegedly filled-in with paving stones. We don't know what else is in these pits, so we decided to put in raised beds. We'll be eating a lot of what we grow in this garden, so we want to limit how much toxic nastiness our plants consume.

You have to work with what you've got, and we've got gravel. Plenty of it. Gravel can be great for improving drainage, but digging in gravelly dirt is not fun. We'll be planting some trees in this area, and I don't want to dig through any more rocky soil than I have to. I began by moving the gravel from the raised beds into the paths. After a while, I started just piling it up out of the way, back by the fence. Once the raised beds are in-place, I'll spread the gravel onto the paths.


We also had plenty of weeds, more optimistically known as "opportunists". Yes, there are plants that can grow in gravel and dust. Given enough time, they would have grown, died, and composted themselves into a layer of soil on top of the gravel. We don't want to wait that long, and we also don't want so many of those particular plants. So instead, we're putting down a layer of cardboard to smother the weeds. We got this cardboard from a few different sources. After Adam and Cecelia moved, we took the boxes back to Pittsburgh. The rest we pulled out of various dumpsters and recycling drop-offs.


The edges of the beds are bricks and cement blocks, most of which we got from Construction Junction. We tried to find good sources on Craigslist, but that usually did not work out. Construction Junction was a pretty dependable source. The blocks did well for the straight border along our neighbor's wall. The bricks are great for curvy sections.


That is a big pile of dirt. That pile is the first 8 cubic yards of blended topsoil and compost that we bought. We ordered 16 yards (two truckloads), but they only had room to dump 8 yards in the lot. That ended up being a blessing, since only half of the beds were ready to be filled when the first truckload came.

Getting this soil delivered was a pretty major production. The 10-ton, single-axle dump truck didn't have much room to maneuver down our alleyway. I scheduled them to come on trash day, since that is the only day such a large vehicle can get through. Most days, one side of our street is lined with parked cars, which doesn't leave much room for anything larger than a minivan. Everyone moves their cars for the garbage truck to get through on Fridays, so that was the only day the dump truck with our soil could get to our lot.

After the soil was delivered, I used a wheelbarrow to move it into the beds. Then, I stacked a second course of bricks around the beds. These were solid bricks, without the holes in them like the first layer, which suddenly gave the garden a finished look.


Then it was time to plant some seeds. Finally some actual gardening!


Honestly, the hardest part of the process has been gathering the materials. When you are trying to avoid using new materials, you have to wait for items to become available. We started creating a stash of bricks last fall, and we still need to get more. We only recently started searching the local dumpsters for cardboard. I wish I had started doing that earlier. The local Subway and Rite-Aid have a steady stream that would otherwise end up in a landfill. There seems to always be some freshly broken-down boxes lying on top. We haven't had to actually dive into a dumpster, yet.

We're still trying to get up to date with this blog. The first truckload of soil came two weeks ago, and since then we got the second load. We'll keep posting about the current work in building and planting the raised beds, and we'll also share a bit of our inspirations and the design process. Happy gardening, folks!