Eric and I spent a good part of Memorial Day weekend building a vegetable garden. A few months ago it was what I "lovingly" referred to as a brier patch. When I started actually pulling it up it turned out that it was a HUGE patch of overgrown wisteria that looked something like this with less of the pretty flowers:
I probably spent three hours a day for four or five days clearing out the area before I got to an area with thriving poison ivy (of which I only contracted one spot on each wrist in the exact same spot. I attribute the fact that it was such a mild case to my daily dose of Rhus Tox) and a scary rotting stump. Progress stopped for quite some time due to my fear of both poison ivy and the killer _______ I was sure was hiding in the rotten stump just waiting for its chance to jump out and kill me if I got too close.
After much stalling, we finally hired a tree service to grind down the stump. This turned into a much larger job that included pruning 9 trees, clearing out the rest of the patch and some overgrown area behind the back yard as well.
We now had a blank slate. We borrowed a tiller and Eric tilled garden to be while I went fence shopping. We ended up with a fantastic semi-permanent fence that comes in 3 foot spans that you attach together with posts. It looks much better than any other garden fence I've seen, is high and sturdy enough to keep deer, dogs and small children out and I'm hoping will be a deterrent to squirrels and rabbits as well. It even has a gate! Many trips to many stores later we had our fence set up and started to work on digging furrows for planting. This was back breaking work, but I'm hoping it will result in some fantastic veggies. So far we've got 9 varieties of heirloom tomatoes, a melon 3 types of squash, two peppers, an eggplant, radishes, green beans, 3 cucumbers, some strawberries and the root ball of some green onions I used the last of in my eggs yesterday. I planted roses, herbs and marigolds around and in between the veggies in the hopes they will keep away bugs. Now here's to hoping we get enough sun!
We found the rocks for the flower garden in the soil as we were tilling and clearing the area.
Fingers crossed that the sun is enough!
Late afternoon.
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