DIRT

Since this is my first garden in this house (last year we moved in spring, so I just did some container gardening, which was pretty successful), we had to actually build a garden this year. Always a chore.

I was inspired by a book I found at the Friends of the Library booksale about raised bed gardening. I knew I wanted to do a raised bed because of my back problems, and because I don't want to till my yard. At our old house I did a raised bed with railroad ties, but decided not to do that again because they are a) insanely heavy and b) full of creosote. My book extolled the virtues of cinder block gardening, so that is what I decided to do.

Well, cinder blocks are ALSO very heavy!! And I used about 110 of them in total.

Mike was very helpful the first few trips. After that, he gave up... "I didn't think the garden was going to be this big a freaking deal!" he muttered bitterly. (This makes me think of the Little Red Hen...I'm sure he'll be eager to eat the bounty of my garden once I'm growing vegetables....but he doesn't want to help build it!!)

So my parents and my sister, who are looking forward to helping reap the rewards of my sowing, as they don't have a garden of their own, came over and we knocked out those cinder blocks in an afternoon.

So great--I've got a garden....or an above ground pool, depending on what I want to fill it with! Mom advises me to line the whole thing with weed fabric to hold the dirt in, so we do that and hold it down with bricks.

My cinder block book said you shouldn't plant crops in actual "Dirt," and buying potting soil to fill your garden is pretty expensive. The author suggested an even mixture of compost, sand, manure and peat. So that is what I decided to do.

Well, the problem is that the only way I could find to obtain those items is to buy them in 40 lbs bags from Lowe's. My garden is about 30 feet long and 4 feet wide, so that is a LOT of bags. To buy and to haul. I bought 10 bags of each, and with my family's help moved them to the backyard....and I thought I was going to keel over, plus it didn't appear that it would even make a drop in the bucket in this huge garden.

My dad suggested buying a load of dirt to fill the majority of the bed, and just use good potting soil around where the plants would actually be planted. This sounded like a good idea. I called around and found that I could get a load of pretty decent dirt delivered for about $150 (four "yards" of dirt, however much that is).

So a few days a later, a giant pile of dirt was in our front lawn. All we had to do was get it into the backyard and in the garden!

Our wheelbarrow and our backs are weak at best, so we hired our lawn guy to do it. He moved all the dirt and, surprisingly, that gigantic pile did not completely fill my garden hole! So I took those 30 bags of expensive, rich stuff that I bought and decided to work it in and make it the top 6 inches or so--that would be good to plant the plants in.

I had good peat, mushroom compost (smells GROSS) and manure. I started emptying bags. I thought I could take a flat rake or a hoe and just mix everything together nicely; I didn't count on it being very wet and chunky and thick. I had to chop at the big chunks just to separate them. it was so wet that no mixing was going on. So I left it to dry out for a night.

When I came out the next evening to do my mixing and stirring, there was an impenetrable, hard crust over the garden. That stuff had dried out, all right: just like concrete. I was taking chunks of it in my hands and breaking it up; I was astonished at the amount of gravel and just plain ol' ROCKS that was mixed in with the manure and peat. What are they feeding the cows, gravel? I looked at and felt that dirt, and I knew no plant could grow in it--it's too hard. The roots could never move around.

Nevertheless, I was desperate to get some plants in the ground, as it was already early May. I planted a couple of my pitiful tomatoes and some squash...just as I had feared. Nothing was able to grow. Everything died.

I was going to have to figure out something else....fast.

It's Been Awhile....And Things Are Not Going Well

Well, I guess I started off this year with a bit of an inflated sense of my own gardening abilities.

I've been greatly humbled trying to start plants from seed. I bought a grow lamp, made sure they were in a good south-facing window, I got peat pots and started them at the right time, I watered them as instructed. Still, all my plants became very "leggy." Long and spindly with no way to support themselves, they just flop over. I transplanted into larger peat pots, with more dirt, but this didn't seem to help.

The ones that did the best were the squash and cucumber plants. The tomatoes are weak and sickly looking (could this be the dread "damping off" I read so much about?), the nicandra didn't even come up at all, the broccoli died quickly.

So once some of those squash plants were looking good, I put them outside to "harden off." I did this just as my instructions said, too. Increasing hours of sun exposure, less water, etc. I actually had ONE that was looking good enough to put in the ground! So I planted it in the garden a few days ago (yes, I'm getting a late start which is just another sucky thing about this year's garden). It was actually doing pretty well and growing! Then yesterday I went outside, and all the leaves were GONE! All that was left was a scrawny little base stalk. I looked at my other plants, and they looked the same. Some voracious critter or bug had chewed off my leaves!! I have never witnessed this problem before (I realize I've only been gardening for four years, but I have seen a lot of bugs and diseases). So I am on a mission to figure out what the heck is eating my babies.