A while back, my youngest child came home from school one day and said,
"Mom, I really want a backyard sustainable garden," as if we haven't had a garden her entire life.
But, in fairness, the trees had grown up so tall around the old garden
that nothing would really grow there anymore. It was way too shady, and
the wood boxes had started to rot so it was definitely time for a change.
And frankly, when your kid says to you they'd rather be outside digging in the dirt
and growing things than inside on video games, it's kind of hard to say no to that.
I decided that I really didn't want to spend a whole lot of money on this project,
so I used whatever things I had around the house already, as well as some
pallets that a few friends of mine had leftover that they gave me.
Once we had a good idea of what we had available to us to use,
we sat down and drew out a map of how we wanted it to look.
A lot of people say "Pallet wood is so wonderful to use for things!"
I have never been able to get a pallet apart without tearing the wood up completely,
so I decided to just cut the pieces out.
And then, to keep the soil from coming out of the sides,
we used some landscape fabric and some of those pieces of wood
to hold the fabric in place.
And I used some old four-by-fours leftover from an old playset to make planter boxes.
I reused the soil from our old garden
which was still pretty hearty, but i did add a little bit of manure to it just to
beef it up a little bit.
("Beef it up" -- that was funny. Unintentional pun!)
All right, so I've determined that the wood in this old
garden is not worth saving. Most of it is just so rotted that it's just...
I mean you can see it's just ... and they're all like this, every plank is like this, so I
believe I'm just gonna have to scrap that, unfortunately, but I am still gonna
use the soil and some of the rocks, and of course the stepping stones in the new
garden. And there's a couple of plants that I might be able to transplant so
I'm gonna try that too.
So we salvaged what we could from the old garden,
and pressure-washed the bricks and the patio stones.
I used the old bricks and the rods
from the old boxes to hold the bricks in place, and I reclaimed the sand and
pebbles from the old garden to level out the walking space between the boxes.
And then I added more of the reclaimed soil from the old garden, planted some
seeds, planted some pretty flowers because you want your garden to look pretty.
And of course you want to be able to eat out of your garden, so I added
some herbs, as well as some tomatoes and some peppers, cucumbers and a few other things.
So in my old garden I had some stuff that decided it was going to try
to bloom, and of course I wanted to try to save it if I could. There was some
Lily of the Valley in there; don't want to throw that away! Some Hostas...
again, want to keep those if you can, and a few things that I honestly cannot remember
the name of, but I'm gonna try to transplant them and see if they'll take
in the new garden or possibly in some containers.
My daughter is actually eating chives that she found here in the woods.
Chives actually grow wild here in this area of the world ,so I'm gonna pluck
some of these out of the ground and transfer them into our garden.
See, that's what they look like underneath. Cool, huh?
Now, I'm no Master Gardener, but I have learned a few things over the years.
Eggshells for instance can add calcium back into your soil, which is
particularly good for tomatoes especially if your tomatoes have come
out with a little brown spot on them right off of the vine. Just crunch up the
shells and sew them into your soil. Another way to add additional nutrients
back into your soil is ashes from wood burning logs. Now this will also raise
the pH of your soil, so you wouldn't want to put it around acid-loving plants like
azaleas and blueberries and strawberries, but it's really great for tomatoes and a
lot of the other plants in your garden, as well as the hardwood trees in your yard.
If you chop up green onions or scallions and you have that little white
piece left, replant it in your garden and it just might sprout again.
It's been a few weeks and the garden is starting to really look beautiful!
The herbs and flowers are gorgeous, the tomatoes are growing very nicely.
The chives aren't doing so hot, but they are perennials and they're bulbs, so they might
come back. The scallions are regrowing. The Lily of the Valley is on its way to
blooming, and that Hosta looks beautiful in that pot on my deck.