have a garden

Thanks to the mild weather in San Diego my winter planting includes: swiss chard, dragon carrots, fava beans, clover, herbs, mums and strawberries.

It took five months to go from lawn to raised beds, compost bin and working garden, but I am really please with how it looks and very excited to see the first sprouts!

My 400 sqft raised garden is finally built and ready for planting tomorrow. I have heard a little about bio dynamic farming and checked the “planting calendar” on the Farmer’s Almanac website today to discover the 11th is a “poor planting day”. I am so eager to get my fava beans and clover in the ground and was disappointed to learn I need to wait.

Here is the calendar:

November 2009
9th-13th. Poor Period For Planting. Kill Plant Pests, Clear Fence Rows/land. 14th-15th. Favorable Days For Planting Root Crops. Fine For Sowing Grains, Hay, And Forage Crops. Plant Flowers. 16th-18th. Good For Planting Cabbage, Celery, Brussels Sprouts, Collards, And Other Leafy Vegetables

I don’t know how much there is to the planting calendar, but I do not have a green thumb and need all the help I can get. Guess I will put the drip irrigation in place Wed and plant on Sat when the moon is right.

DH and I undertook a major project (not that we realized it at the beginning) of replacing out lawn with a garden. If you are considering such an project, read on: it is not for the faint of heart and can become a serious undertaking. A few small planter boxes or barrels may be a much better idea for those with limited time/ budget.

First there was the issue of killing the Bermuda grass that would not die, at least not without two applications of roundup, which I hate to use. Having killed the grass around July, we hauled in 12 yards of compost and layered it 10” thick on the lawn. Then we watered and waited. And waited. And watered. And waited. This kind of defeated the purpose of tearing out the grass to save water and the water hardly penetrated the compost to 6”, not nearly far enough to compost the now hopefully dead grass beneath.

Around Labor Day we decided to act bought a tiller and attempted to till the compose and the lawn. HA! the lawn and soil was now rock hard and would not give to the whirling blades.

So we rented a bigger tiller which was a Beast, but finally did the job—and ate through 2 pvc irrigation pipe which then had to be spliced and replaced.

After tilling came digging and that proved to be way more work than anticipated. Had we designed the garden in advance, perhaps we could have avoided some of this by piling the compost and tilling portions of the garden, but I am not sure that would have worked due to our relatively narrow garden paths. So we spent two afternoons digging out paths at which point we decided boxes would really be better than mounds in the long run.

This lead to building raised boxes in October. In brief this entails seemingly endless measuring, hauling, cutting, refitting, digging post holes, tacking weed suppressing mesh on the paths and shuffling of dirt. Oh, and unless you are in perfect agreement with your partner some amount of fighting (re: design, measurements etc).

During box building we decided that the flimsy wire fence we used around the lawn and between the yard gate to keep our large dogs out, would not suffice. It only takes one person to forget to put the wire “fence” back up and the dogs would have nice soft soil to belly down in, destroying sprouting seeds in the mean time. We decided we also needed to construct a fence and gate and why not just extend it across another 60 ft of yard to make it all look nice and tidy.

As of today November 1 the boxes are 95% finished and look fantastic, but have nothing in them. After hours of wrangling at Home Depot we have the materials and design plan we will need two construct two gates and the fence around the garden. I also have the seeds for a cover crop for winter to enrich the soil and plan to plant a few herbs and plan to do this next weekend. I’ll worry about installing the drip irrigation then as well. DH should be busy on the fence for the next month.

All this has cost well over $800 and we probably need another $200 in materials to finish the fence + plants another $100?

I thought this whole project would take about 1 month and cost $500 for soil, plants and materials. I do not even want to think about how much we spent on garden tools, tools to dig and tools to cut, drill and till. The goal now is to wrap up all fence building and construction by Dec 1 and let the garden sit for a few months. The soil may not need to rest, but I do!

Now that all the digging and soil prep is done DH is putting in boxes. They look good.

I’m sick today, but if I am better this weekend it’s time to till the compost into the soil and sew some clover. My goal is to get the garden going this fall

I have committed to starting a garden to reduce the fossil fuels required to produce the food I consume. At some point in the future I hope to use my grey water from sinks only to support my garden and fruit trees.

Now I just wish myfarm.com was in the area to help me get started.