Monday, April 15th, 2013: This weekend I
regularly used the term “coarse vermiculite”.
Don’t I sound capable and smart?
Aren’t you jealous of my fancy word use?
Do you even care what coarse vermiculate is? (The answer to all these,
I’m thinking, is “no”). Well, in case
you maybe care a little bit, here’s what’s happening: we are planting a
vegetable garden. For years, this has
seemed like something I should so totally
be doing. Me and the Growing of Food in
One’s Own Yard are a match made in heaven.
Healthy eating is a way of life for my family (with our fair share of
chocolate and beer sprinkled in), I’m on a tight budget so the farmer’s market-
while wonderful- is sometimes too much for my wallet to handle, and I’m known
by friends and acquaintances as something of a hippie who makes her own
cleaning supplies, cloth diapered her kid, and goes through phases where she
makes all her bread from scratch. So why
have I waited this long? The short
answer is: I’m lazy. The longer one has
to do with being very intimidated by trying to grow anything, worrying about
the initial costs, being a working mother who barely has time for the living
things she’s already responsible for, and…um, laziness. But this year, a few stars aligned to make it
seem like it’s really a good time. We moved
into a new house last fall, and it has a perfect flat, sunny area in the
backyard. My mother, who has grown many
a vegetable garden but can’t do it currently because the deer eat everything in
her yard, offered to back the project financially in exchange for a share of
the bounty. And, finally, my daughter is
5 and ½, which seems like the perfect age for truly reaping the benefits of
being involved in a gardening project.
Thus, the coarse vermiculite.
We're going to do Square-Foot Gardening, which is all the rage, and seems like a good place to start for a novice. I won't get into a lot of detail on the exact theory and all that, but you can check it out at squarefootgardening.org
For our first step we:
- Put together the wooden border
- Laid down a weed barrier material
- Mixed and spread the soil
Next, planning out the plot and getting those seeds and seedlings in the ground.
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| Fiona nailed the decorative tops on by herself |
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| Fiona and her Nana set weed barrier material |
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| Lee, my mom, and Fiona: mix, mix, mix |
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