How Black Thumbs Bare Fruit

Despite my lifelong love of nature I didn't grow up fond of yard work (I'm not a fan of sweating or manual labor), nor did I seem capable of keeping even the hardiest house plant alive for any length of time. A perfect case in point is when I bought a potted palm that was thriving in the indoor section of my local warehouse store. I watered it a couple times a week, and kept it in a sunny spot in my living room. Within the first week of being in my possession it started turning brown around the edges. Then, whole fronds were turning brown and falling off. After a few months of watching it slowly wither away I finally took the plant outside and hoped being outdoors would revive it. No luck. That damn thing was dead as a doornail. Eventually, I got tired of looking at the pitiful reminder of my black thumb and it played it's inevitable role in nature and became compost.

I really love the idea of growing my own food but was hesitant to do so after my previous failures. Thankfully Adam isn't cursed with a black thumb. Last September/October Adam and I built a planter box and started our garden.

This is how we did it:

a rake to de-grass a part of the yard

3 cedar 8' planks (one cut in half)

a roll of weed cloth

a couple bags of sand

bags of manure and top soil

a staple gun

nails and a hammer

We assembled the cedar into a 4' x 8' rectangle and nailed the ends together. Once the box was secure we stapled weed cloth to the bottom making sure to wrap it up and over the sides so when we laid it down there was no way the pesky weeds could sneak in. We cleared a spot of the yard of grass, spread out some sand to help with drainage, and laid our planter box on top. We filled it ¾ of the way full with a mixture of half top soil/half manure, making sure to leave the dirt as loose as possible.

Because we were concerned with water conservation and heard it worked better, we set up drip irrigation for our box. Once all that prep work was done we planted green beans, wax beans, carrots, and onions. The benefit of the raised planter box with weed cloth was that for the first few months we had hardly any weeds to contend with. Even now it isn't difficult to keep in check. Our beans were pitiful, sadly, but the carrots were awesome! For the most part they looked like real carrots and tasted delicious! The onions were a later addition to the garden and are just now starting to bulb.

Right now we have chives, leeks, basil, and mint in old wooden wine boxes we re-purposed from our neighbors trash pile.  All we did there was drill out some holes and nail scrap wood on the bottom of each crate for drainage.  Filled them with a little bit of gravel, and then soil/compost mixture and planted! We also squared off another section of yard and planted some marigolds, zinnias, and cosmos so I could fill my vases with fresh flowers from my garden. We didn't make another raised box so this part of the garden is extremely weedy but it is still dutifully producing beautiful flowers!

Overall I'd say our gardening adventure has been hit or miss. We learned a lot this first planting and hope to improve our yield the next time around. Maybe next year we'll try our hand at broccoli or lettuce or cucumbers or kale, or maybe even asparagus! The possibilities are endless!

In the distance there you can (barely) see the veggie garden and the flower garden behind it.  And the ugly shed and my canoe, of course!  Better pictures to be posted as soon as it stops raining long enough for me to snap some photos!

Next up on the blogging agenda is homemade cleaners!  I'm excited, aren't you?!