Garden Attempt- Part 1

I like food, a lot.  I like fresh food even better.  I like experimenting with recipes and learning new ways to prepare and preserve food.  I also like growing things and try to do my part to help protect the environment.

So the project is this: we (my husband, Kass, and I) bought a house from my mother-in-law in December of 2009 with a half acre lawn in Parkland, Washington.  Awesome.  I want a garden (and orchard and chickens and beehives) and Kass wants less yard to have to mow.  So far so good.  Scott and Sara (our best friends) also want a garden, but they live in an apartment that doesn't allow buckets of tomatoes growing on the roof (they tried).  So figuring that a start-up garden would require more time and money than Kass and I had to work with, we asked Scott and Sara (the Haytours) to join us (the 'Rowskis) in a cooperative garden effort.

The Backyard before.

We got off to a great start!  January, 2010 was so mild we were able to rent a sod cutter and tiller and cut out a 20x30ish plot.  I also went to Costco and bought some fruit trees (2 apple, 2 cherry, and one of those self-pollinating pears that has more than one variety grafted onto a single trunk) and some blueberry bushes.  We transplanted 3 raspberry bushes from a house that Scott rented with his brother the previous year.  Kass and Scott (the ultimate scavengers) found an old greenhouse frame and a window and door that fit it.  A couple 55 gallon plastic barrels became a composter and a rain barrel.  Things were looking good!

Full of promise....and rocks.

Garden, house, shed, etc.

Greenhouse sans walls.

And then there were rocks, lots and lots of rocks!  We spent at least 3 full days sifting rocks out of the ground using an ingenious contraption built by my husband.

Let's take a brief side trip for a moment.  I love my husband.  He is one of the most creative people I know, and that's saying a lot. He can build a tool, gadget, or machine to accomplish any task, even if making the gadget takes more work than the job it was built to do.  Kass was the kid who made a year's worth of trips to the mailbox trying to build a pulley system so he wouldn't have to go get the mail.  It means he is constantly bringing home spare cords, motors, bike racks, you name it.  That said, the rock sifter was one of the best ideas he has come up with.

The rock sifter was essentially a four-by-four foot box with four legs and wire mesh stretched over the top and a high powered motor with a shaking mechanism attached to the corner.  You dump rocky soil in the top, the soil sifts through and the rocks stay behind.  After three days of back-breaking labor and a giant pile of rocks in the corner of the yard (lovingly named Mount Hodorowski) we had a little over two rows finished.  That was about the point we gave up on the rock sifting. The March rains set in and the soil was too wet to work.  We had plans to finish the sifting when the weather got nicer, and well, it didn't.

Mt. Hodorowski!

Still, we had our seeds started, the greenhouse got plastic sheeting for walls.  We planted a bunch of strawberries, peas, cucumber, zucchini, corn, broccoli, tomatoes, herbs and I think even a melon of some sort.  Then I found out I was pregnant (we had been trying to conceive) and for the first 17 weeks I wasn't allowed to do anything physical due to complications.  Sara had to go to Minnesota for a month for work/ visiting.  The weather went from cold and rain to heat wave and drought.  It was the perfect storm for garden failure. 

All in all, we ended up with enough snap peas for a salad, a few cucumbers, a bunch of zucchini the size of my calf (not quite ready, not quite ready....the next day, monster squash!) and a handful of the most delicious strawberries and raspberries on the planet.  All the fruit trees except the pear survived. The blueberry bushes fell victim to an overzealous lawn mower.  Needless to say, we need a new plan.  We learned a lot of what not to do last year and have started anew.

Things we are doing differently:
1. Raised beds- we bought a roll of landscape fabric and laid it down over the garden plot.  Kass re-purposed the wood from old pallets to build raised beds filled with Tagro.
2. Soaker hoses- we purchased a watering timer and soaker hoses to keep everything properly watered throughout the summer.
3. Moved the greenhouse- The greenhouse has been moved next to the house to make it easier to check on things, water plants, etc.
4. Compost bins- a few of the pallets are now a 3-bin compost system.
5. Chickens- more on them later.

So this blog will serve as a record of Garden Attempt Part 2 + Chickens + Mushrooms + whatever else we try to add to the mix.  I hope to keep track of planting times, yields, recipes, chicken growth and egg production, what worked, what didn't, exciting new taste sensations, and the joys of seeing my baby boy take his first bites of food grown right in his own backyard.

Cheers, and happy growing!