Days in the Dirt

Preparation is key, or so I'm told.  While I have minimal hands-on experience at this gardening thing, I have years experience with looking up random and unusual things on the intarwebs.   That said, part of the point of this is to get my hands quite literally dirty, for a change, so I am charging ahead without worrying too much about the minutea.  First step - destruction and death.

As has been mentioned previously, this whole situation started with an overgrown, weedy box next to the house.  And you can't grow food in weeds.  Or whatever those plants were.  Thus, the weeds must be exterminated.

Now, my original intent was to show you a lovely progression of Before and After pictures.  The box was overgrown with weeds three feet high, without hardly any space in between plants.  It would've been great to show this awesome picture of a slice of jungle, and then the lovely clear box ready to plant. Unfortunately, all of the original pictures I took yesterday prior to my vegetation purge were lost.  So, I'll just show you what I took out of the box :

No, that is neither a shoggoth nor some evil nature monster.  That's a pile of weeds extracted over the course of several hours from the planter box you see behind it.  As mentioned, I'm not 100% sure what some of those weeds were.  I also found trash of all kinds, bizarre unrecognizable fabrics, and the ruined remains of what was at some point a shrub or something.  That had to come out, too:

This root system is a good three feet long, and was level with the surface of the dirt when I started.  I also found countless root bulb clusters from what appeared to be some kind of wild lilly that had grown in the garden.  Whatever it was, it was very well entrenched.  Emphasis on the was.

Anyway, finished up last night with an experiment.  Yesterday, I got a soil testing kit, and after a little work, was able to verify that the soil in this empty bed was a little alkaline for our purposes and could do with a bit of fertilizer to help prepare it.  During our errands yesterday, we also got some gardening tools and a first batch of seeds.  We've got everything from standard carrots and lettuce to unusual radishes and salsify.  And no, salsify is what you do to a chip when you put some chili sauce on it.  I'll go into more detail on what exactly is going into the bed with tomorrow's update.

Having verified that the soil needed some improvements, we acquired peat moss, some organic plant food, and I also picked up Square Foot Gardening, which is apparently a very clever technique for getting more viable food out of limited space.  The guy makes some excellent points, so I'll be testing his techniques out.  armed with knowledge and soil additives, I grabbed a shovel and rake and dug in.

Four hours later, I couldn't lift my arms.  I'd probably drank a gallon of water (note - don't try and build garden on a hot July afternoon.  Just don't, really.), shoveled the same dirt more times than I'd care to count, and found even more of those mystery bulbs hiding in the dirt.  But my efforts were not in vain.

Before:

After:

Dirt is almost completely broken up, 2.2 cubic feet and 3 1/2 pounds of fertilizer have been mixed in, and the overwhelming majority of weeds have been removed.  I even hosed the whole bit down just to get the juices flowing from the plant food.

So, tomorrow morning Sarah and I are up bright and early to lay out the planting grid, and then we actually put seed to soil!

In the meantime, tonight we had salad containing radishes from the community garden, and Impossible Cheeseburger Pie containing onions from the same.  Every time I the sore muscles in my legs, arms, and back get to me, I remember how delicious that meal was.  Nothing in this world like feasting on the fruits of your own labors.

Oh, and I am currently taking suggestions for what to name the flamingo.  Acquired him at a christmas party a few years back and he spent the interim in a box in the basement of my old apartment building.  Time for him to see some sunlight!