Square Foot Gardening

After years of my poor gardening skills I decided we'd try Square Foot Gardening. I spent the winter thinking about this. In a timely manner the railroad behind Aragorn's building happened to drop off a rather large pile of railroad ties. Long story short, *they* said we could have them. It seems silly but I was nearly giddy over this.

Railroad ties are surprisingly heavy, even in 4 or 5 foot lengths. So perhaps our boxes are not quite perfect but they'll do.

First we did this incorrectly, naturally. I didn't realize we were suppose to dig down first so this is Sam smoothing out the dirt.

Every helpful Pippin finds a worm to give to the "oosters". (roosters)

Still in the incorrect step of our gardening attempts we mixed the "ideal" soil.

Need I say that the boys just dove right in and started mixing that soil up.

Wallowing is not a problem around here...

Mind you this was percisely 1 hour before Sam was to serve for a Traditional Latin Mass Wedding!

As I was thinking this seemed like awfully lightweight soil, I realized we were first suppose to dig down 6-12 inches and mix that dirt in with the soil we had already prepared. Now this is alot of work believe me! But the enjoyable kind of work.

So finally our first 5 boxes are ready. I really enjoyed planning out the square foot garden. The sticks are laths and those are just used initially to divide up the sections so you know what is coming up where.

Merry filling up our peat pots so we can get some sensitive-to-the-cold basil started in our crude warming bed. (the basil never survived the peat pots as *someone* knocked them all over spilling the entire contents, oh well, basil can be bought in pots at the farmer's market so that is what we did!)

Eowyn planting some seeds.

Lo and behold we found some parsley that had come up from last year! We also found some onions... mighty potent onions I might add.

You can see here the digging process *phew*

Aragon made a big *L* shaped box (since the chain on the chain saw broken when making the other 5 smaller boxes we couldn't saw up any more ties) This time we started correctly and dug down and then mixed in with the prepared soil.

One month later we have some greener growing. At first we grew quite a bit of grass (in the gardens not the front lawn).

The peas were starting to get taller so we added in some trellis for climbing.

We found a piece of corn from last year that had sprouted and we found it rather fascinating.

It was just so neat how the piece of corn was still there and the stalk and the roots were coming out of it. Really amazing.

Planting Crops