Thursday, June 25, 2009

How Does Your Garden Grow?

I am finally making progress on the garden. Now that the fence is up I can start planting things knowing they won't get mashed, dug, chewed, stomped, ripped or dragged anywhere. I kind of have a layout of what I want to plant in the garden area and what my eventual vision is but it will come with time. I'm waiting for a few things to go on sale, should be within the next month that the bushes I want to be reduced in price and I can plant like crazy in the hope that the new stuff has enough time to get established before winter. What I did need to get in right away was the veggie garden because the season is high.


Okay, so the ground here is a bitch to dig when you're pulling up the sod. It's like ... 8 inches thick. Comes up easy but it's heavy and hard work. Originally my garden was going to be 8 x 8 feet square but as I was pulling up sod I realized that I was running out of time to get the ground seeded soon enough to ripen.


I cut the size down by half to 4 x 8 and am satisfied with that this season. If this garden is successful I'll dig out the balance next year but start sooner than June in the cool weather! It's not immediately impressive I know, it looks kind of small and pitiful but I tell you, I could only work for about 20 minutes at a time before I was dripping in sweat and had to take a break. It was about 20 degrees and humid too ... no fun doing yard work in that.
I because I had to dig out a chunk of ground I knew I'd have to fill in the hole I'd made. I bought some black earth soil to mix with the red soil to fill in the gap - 10 bags for a $1 each at Walmart. Easy peasy. So now it's seeded, marked, and ready for little sprouts to appear. This is my very first tomato plant. Apparently they are so easy to grow here it's laughable. None of this crazy covering, frost danger, greenhouse/hothouse crap you have to deal with in Calgary. Plant it, cage it, walk away. I never tried to grow tomatoes in Calgary because it sounded like way too much work. We'll see what this little sucker yields.
There's also peas, carrots, lettuce, cucumber, and spinach. I'm not sure about the spinach, I think it might be too hot now to grow because it likes cool wet weather and we have warm wet weather. Whatever, if it doesn't do well I'll just plant something else. Maybe peas ... you can never have too many fresh peas ...


So what did I do with all that sod? Why, I filled in the drop at the back of the concrete pad so it's easier to mow. If the grass dies no big loss, I'm sure it will grow in again one day. That brick is marking where I want to put the maple tree I plan to plant there. I have to drive to my parent's house (or to Bill and Donna's - they are closer in Trenton) to choose some trees to plant. I think I know where, now I just have to actually go and get them. Soon too, I think Raimi is at a loss for something to pee on.

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