Catching up...

So this is my first post and I have a lot of progress to show. We have been putting in a very large vegetable garden in our back yard. It consists of 4 main beds augmented by several deep root plant containers.

With regards to tilling, its been rough, there was a lot of old construction and foundations under the ground. We pulled up close to 100 bricks and countless rocks, railroad spikes and bottles. It was interesting to see these older artifacts neglected by time.

I wound up tilling about 12 inches deep. Once I got the top of the soil loose it was pretty easy to get down deep, at least until I hit roots. I spent quite some time chopping out roots with a mattock.

After tilling up the soil we added nitrogen from coffee grounds from the local coffee shop and a healthy dose of compost from this winter's compost pile. Some friends down the street also offered us their unused compost which was used to seed our now empty compost pile.

There were a lot of other little things that had to be done: hand-edging the bed after tilling, leveling the beds, and spreading the compost, all of which were pretty time- and labor-intensive.

Before we started on our beds, we set up a water catchment system from an old food grade barrel that used to contain lemon juice. Its not the best system, but it allows us to water our container plants at less cost to us or the environment. We hope to add a second barrel and elevate it a bit more, to increase water pressure.

We've have chosen to start the seedlings indoors. I went down to Hyam's on Folly Road and picked up 4 seedling beds and a bag of seeding mix. I made a table from some old 2x4s and some old plywood, hung up a fluorescent light with grow bulbs about 24inches from the top of the containers.

Here are some other images from our preparation for the summer garden: