Weekend Warriors - Backyard Edition

It's been a long time since my last post. Shortly after I posted it, we all got sick for about a week and it took us a while to get back into the swing of things!! But we are back with a vengeance!

We have a desire to be a little more self-sufficient and though I never did much gardening in the past, since we've gotten our own house I've wanted to give it a try. However, it sounded so overwhelming and I didn't know where to start. A friend of ours told Andy and I about "Square Foot Gardening" and so I rented the book from the library. It sounds really fun and easy, but we'll see! hahaha.

The gist of it is that you don't spend time trying to get your local soil just right...you instead level off a part of your yard, lay some weed cloth, and build a 6" tall box, either 4'x4' or 2'x8' - just so it's not wider than 4' it can be any size. Then you mix equal parts peat moss, vermiculite and compost and fill your box. After that, you grid off your box into square feet using lath and then you have 16 areas in which to plant 16 different veggies or herbs (in the case of the 4'x4' box or 2'x8' box). Your soil is perfect and the weed cloth prevents weeds.

This sounded good to us, so we went about it. But first, we mowed and weeded the front lawn. Here are some pictures of Tyler "helping":

Then we went to Home Depot to get some wood and things for our Square Foot Garden. Tyler went down to nap and we went to work! But what transformation would be good without a "before picture"?!?! (Beware: it's pretty shameful!)

After two hours, Tyler was up and it was ready for a lunch break. Here's how far I got on clearing the weeds:

Now, here's the after. We just have to move the rocks by the house over by our Square foot Garden. Then we'll borrow a friend's rototiller to till up the dirt and plant new grass. We're on our way!! :)

OH - P.S. - we chose an 8'x2' and we're going to build more of them up against the fence and leave the middle open as a walkway to access them all. :) Can't wait!