Step 6. Clean It Up

Although we have a ton of plans for our garden that we are just waiting to put into action, we've slowly but surely been attempting to make some improvements in our garden.
We added a beautiful little stone bird bath and some little evergreens (thanks to my dad, asia, and kelsey).

and a little whiskey barrel for holding rain water: 

We've found that utilizing the sprinkler attachment to the hose we've been able to lightly water the garden while controlling the range of the water in order to save as much as possible.

 

But of course the most exciting new things in our garden were the appearance of our little seedlings:

Spinach:

 Carrots:

We are so excited everyday to see our garden and what it has been doing.
Soon we hope to add a rain collection barrel to hook to our down spouts, some sort of sustainable protection from birds, a compost tumbler, and gravel for the walkways.

Step 5: Planting

After putting our garden together, we started collecting seeds slowly. We bought our first bunch of organic seeds from Whole Foods. We got Basil, Danvers Carrots, Sugar Pie Pumpkins, and Bloomsdale Spinach. We immediately set to planting the carrots and spinach. It was actually pretty late by the time we got these two in the ground, but you know what they say: better late than never.

 

Glenn spent a day in the garden putting in our little seeds!

Secondly, after several weeks of avoiding the headache of picking out the exact varieties of seeds that we wanted we finally placed our order at Baker Creek Heirloom seeds, a wonderful seed company that provides all natural, rare, and non-gmo seeds.
We ended up with: Purple Jalepeno, King of the North Bell Peppers, Brandywine Tomatoes, Kentucky Wonder Bean Pole, Dill, Thyme, Cilantro, Lavender, Sugar Baby Watermelons, Marigolds, and got a free funky type of melon that I can't even pronounce! We were so excited today when they came in the mail!

 We immediately made a trip to the store to get some nice, rich, potting soil and biodegradable seed cups for our future transplants.

 

In total we ended up with 4 tomato plants, 4 bell pepper plants, 4 lavender plants, and 5 jalepeno plants. The remaining seeds will be sown directly very soon!

Although it took a little bit of gettin' our hands dirty, we had a ton of fun getting our seeds planted

 

...and immediately took them outside in hopes that we might help jump-start the germination by giving them a little shot of UV rays.

 

and finally, in a (probably somewhat rash) spur of the moment decision we wended up with some organic broccoli and kale seeds that we had not originally intended to buy from Whole Foods and planted those together.

From M: All-Natural Apologetics From a Born Again Green-Fiend

 

How I was turned:

I sort of thought that doing things the organic and all natural way was kind of a fad at first, I had to learn the hard way that there's more than meets the eye. After guzzling energy drinks like they were oxygen and eating fast food like I didn't know how to work a stove, I felt terrible all the time!

Finally, I started putting the pieces together when I had bad reactions to every single beauty product I tried (although, I suspect that many a man will take this as his cue to stop reading, I urge your forbearance). It all started in June of 2012 when I ran out of moisturizer and, in my usual manner, wanted to try something new. So I bought a seemingly harmless new moisturizer from a drug store (a brand that is as reputable as a drug store brand can be) and, within a week, I had completely broken out all over my face.
I stuck with it for a few weeks thinking that maybe it was unrelated but, alas, no change. So, I said, "maybe its just the cheap drug-store stuff" so I went to the cosmetics counter at Macy's and bought the most expensive moisturizer in the store.

I knew that I might have to wait a few weeks or even months to see results. I did wait but, surprisingly enough, nothing changed. I went back and got a different one: same story. Finally I said, alright, I can't pronounce a single ingredient on any of these labels. I did some research and found that most of the ingredients in an everyday beauty product in America aren't even legal in Europe (they've banned over 10,000 ingredients that are still common in American products). That sent up a red flag.
So I tried an all-natural (and affordable) brand, and like magic, my face cleared within two weeks.

Although I cannot say whether I just happened to be allergic to all three of the different moisturizers I tried between June and December, I can say that that experience made me believe that there was some credence to the idea that one should be able to pronounce the ingredients in their face washes, moisturizes, and everything in between.

People say "no pain, no gain" but my experience tells me otherwise. Everything I've ever tried that felt bad such as washes that burned or felt greasy or caused my skin to itch, those were the things that eventually caused a negative reaction.

That when I first started evaluating how things that seem harmless effect me. I stopped drinking energy drinks everyday day to find that I felt even more energetic and less nauseous.

Although I do think its really great that these all-natural and organic prodcuts are better for the environment and are more sustainable and what not, that is not what "turned" me. It was simply seeing first hand how much better I feel when I use these organic and all natural things rather than the chemical-packed, preservative-filled alternatives.

As it is, I have stopped using anything that contains hormones (already a vegetarian, this shift was not that difficult for me), stopped drinking energy drinks, stopped eating fast food, am only using all-natural products on my skin, and trying my hardest to only consume all-natural and organic foods. I feel so much better physically--eradicating, for the most part, the constant nausea that I had come to classify as chronic. Some people might want to play the "its mental" card, but after seeing what a simple change in moisturizer could do to my skin, I have to beg to differ.

This is why I have chosen to create an organic garden and hopefully eventually eat only organic foods.  Although I have not made a shift so drastic as to only buy organic clothes or cleaning products, anything that goes into my body will definitely be checked for the green seal of approval. Maybe, eventually, I will find that those changes will also bring me marked improvement.

- M

Step 4: Put It All Together.

Several weeks after the decision to build our garden was made, we finally put all the pieces together. We brought all the boxes to the garden, brought all the dirt to the garden and filled them up!

 

Glenn fixed one of the boxes in the garden:

 

 We put the dirt in:

 

 

While kelsey loosened the soil once more for good measure...

 

Step 3: Dirt!

This proved to be one of the hardest decisions that we had had to make so far. Finding and buying the perfect soil was a scary prospect because depending on the decision that we made we'd be spending anywhere from 100-400 or more dollars and hinging the life of all of our fruits and vegetables on the decision. We could either have it delivered by the truckload or buy it in bags from the store. Despite the fact that the local, truck delivered stuff had all kinds of benefits, the bags won out based on the price and suggestions of people who had experience working with it. We went with a local brand that seemed really good quality. We had also used it for our roses and liked how it was working so far.

The next decisions was how much soil? Mr. Bartholomew (of Square Foot Gardening fame) suggested using 1/3 vermiculite, 1/3 peat moss, and 1/3 compost mixture. We quickly realized that we could not afford to attempt this mixture and decided (hoped) that the good old fashioned dirt kinda stuff would work just fine for us. So we ended up still doing 1/3 composted manure, 6/10 soil, and 1/10 peat moss.

We made a trip to the store and ended up with 40 bags of soil, 18 bags of composted manure, and 2 85 lb bags of peat moss....

AND promptly awoke the next morning to this beautiful sight:

Step 2. Box It Up, Baby!

After contemplating several ideas from a traditional row style garden to a raised bed we landed somewhere in-between. Unknowingly, we ended up building our garden based off of the general concepts of the Square Foot Gardening book by Mel Bartholomew (it was only later when, off of a recommendation, we read the book and discovered how similar our garden was turning out).

- We didn't like the sound of traditional row gardening or how space ineffective it was and our preexisting soil didn't like the idea of trying to grow anything but weeds (despite having amended it to some degree, the clay wouldn't be very good for growing fruits and vegetables in and of itself).

- We wouldn't afford a real, true, raised bed. Building a raised bed would require about 5 times the amount of money towards wood as we would have wanted to spend and the same in soil.

 So here is what we decided to do:
We would build a 5 square foot box, 6 inches tall and fill it with an all new, ideal soil mixture. With 6 inches of perfect soil we'd be able to plant everything we wanted to plant, with a little bit of help from the partially amended soil below it.

After a trip to Lowe's, we discovered that treated wood could not be used in a garden because the chemicals to treat it would leech into the bed, despite the 15 years lifespan. The alternative was untreated wood which we were told probably wouldn't last until next year. We ended up with 24 5' planks of treated wood which we wrapped in visquin in order to prevent the chemials from leeching into the garden.

The next step was to put it all together.

and after about a week of box building, we finally brought them out to the garden.

Step 1: Start from Scratch

Glenn and I (Miranda) have a pretty great track record of not being able to keep anything alive. From pets to plants, we've basically failed completely to keep anything alive for more than a few months. Tops. So the decision to build a garden was pretty difficult in that we knew we'd be starting from scratch and having to learn how to do this whole.. not letting stuff die thing.

So we dove in and studied like it was time for finals.

So after reading several books, magazines, and googling like we've never googled before, here's how we started:

1. Find a spot.

A sunny spot outside of the fence in the backyard seemed perfect. So Glenn went to Lowe's, bought a shovel and carved out a perfect rectangle on the southeast corner of the lot. Since we wanted to do it the organic way we needed to try to get deep enough to remove all of the grass and the weeds (there were a ton!) so that we wouldn't need to use any chemicals. 

2. Dig.

With that shovel and a wheelbarrow, he turned that yard into this:

3. A whole lotta other cr*p.

After discovering that the soil half a foot under all that dug up grass and weeds happened to be clay we did some research and figured out that we needed to amend the soil. We added some nitrates and composted manure.

4. Tear that sucker up!

After adding some compost and nitrates our next step was to roto-til the whole thing in order to loosen up the soil and mix in the compost and plant food. After a trip to our closest True Value we went at it!  

(The bags in the front are the rose bushes that we planted and then covered in order to protect them from frost.)

and here's what we got:
mmmm, now there's some nice soil.