The Revenge of the Garden Rookie

I made the decision that my family needed a garden.  With the growing prices of food and a chance of a zombie apocalypse around every corner, the thought of being able to provide some homegrown nutrition to my family became very appealing.  


My Grandparents have long passed away but as a kid I remember the visits to their home and the excitement to get to go out to the garden and explore.  I loved the smell once I was in the garden and getting to break beans in a bowl with my Grandmother was the highlight of my trip. I should also mention that my Grandfather ate vegetables his whole life and was able to live on his own and take care of himself all the way up to age 99!  Let the gardening begin!

Now for the truth, I have no clue what I'm doing.  Although I had knowledgable Grandparents on both sides of my family on gardening, I never learned how myself.  I've got a green thumb when it comes to planting flowers and such, but this is my first real attempt with a vegetable garden.  But no worries because with ideas from my husband, Internet and pinterest, I've designed a fool proof plan...I hope. 


1) The first step would be to pick the spot in the yard.  We live on 2 acres and have plenty of room so we aren't limited on size.   The spot we selected was in full sun and close to a water source.  My little Garden of Eat'n.  I can almost see it now.  We chose the spot last fall, right before the grass went dormant.  I wanted to visually see the size of it, so I used a water hose to mark it out.  Then I sprayed the grass with round up so I wouldn't have to deal with fighting the bermuda grass next spring.

Before Round-up

After Round-up

2)   I don't own a rototiller yet but my neighbor does and he was nice enough to let us use it.  I'm not going to lie about this part..tilling up the yard was not easy.  In fact, it really sucked.  The ground was extremely hard because last summer was one of the hottest we had ever experienced and the drought pretty much turned our soil to concrete.  I soaked the area before we started tilling but it was still difficult.  I was really thankful that my husband did most of the work because it was not easy controlling the self propelled tiller.  We went over it a few times at different depths and finally it started to look like a garden.

The only person more excited than myself about this new adventure is my beautiful little girl.  

She can hardly wait to get to spend time with her Mom working in the garden.

3)  Next was to frame out the garden.  I realize this isn't necessary but I wanted it to look nice in the yard and help keep the weeds out.  This would be easier to mow/weed eat around.  In the spring I will stain the wood to match the brick on our home... I don't want it to look ghetto.  Building this frame cost a bit but I know that it will last a long time and I plan on having a garden from now on.  Plus I had a gift card with credit on it for the two trees that died on me this year from the drought from Lowe's so it kind of felt free in a way. Luckily, my husband is very handy with a hammer so he built my border in just a couple hours.  Again, if you don't have rights to a working husband, I highly suggest you purchase one.

When I decided to do this, I knew I was going to need my own way to compost.  I thought about just doing a pile in the corner of my backyard, but the thought of manually taking a shovel and moving it around did not appeal to me...plus the threat of critters getting in it and the smell turned me off.  I wanted it to be as easy as possible.  I found this sweet machine at Sam's Wholesale and liked that it would contain the smell and would be easy to rotate.  They suggest you have two so as one is composting you can be using the other.  I'm broke so I will have to start with one for now and see how it works out.

With my new gadget, I also needed something to put my table scraps in that wouldn't stink up the whole house.  Before, we threw everything away or pushed it down the disposal in the sink.  Not anymore, we are going to try and think differently now.  My kids are already saying things like, "Don't throw that away, we can put that in the composter."  I love it.

Found it on Amazon and it fits nicely under the sink.  

The bags are compostable so at the end of the week I can toss the whole thing 

in the bin outside. Working out just fine thus far....