Veggie Tales

I mused in a recent post about building a raised garden bed at the cottage. This week, we put some of that musing into action.

While the captain and the princess were off playing at the park, the wee lad and I broke soil on my new veggie/herb garden! We've had some discussions with the kids about having to help with the garden (building and maintaining it) if they're going to be allowed to enjoy any of its produce.

We marked out a 4x8' rectangle and dug out the soil along those lines. There's not a lot of spare soil kicking around the cottage property, so I wanted to reclaim as much dirt as I could from the hunks of sod that we removed. Since the earth was quite dry, this meant giving them a good shake to get the roots free before the remants were flung down the embankment towards the water.

The princess and the captain returned and helped out with that part.

We disturbed another nest of those nasty yellow bitey ants whilst digging and shaking but we managed to avoid any attacks this time.

We also unearthed a bumper crop of these petrified wild truffles. I don't think they're good eats.

Once the soil was removed and the earth was churned up, the Captain got to work building the frame for the raised garden walls. Largely due to a lack of large scrap boards at the cottage, we're going to have to call it a slightly raised bed. We had to scavenge some boards from our neighbours' junk wood pile, but we found enough pieces to frame it.

It might look like we've recently buried Jimmy Hoffa, but I assure you it's just dirt.

The frame is built out of 2x10 boards with 4x4 posts. The posts are sunk down into the corners of the garden. Fortunately, Handy Dad showed up on frame building day, and he was able to help the Captain heft it into place.

With the garden walls in place, we shoved all of the soil down to one end of the garden, and amended the dry dry earth with equal parts composting wood shavings (from a mound up by the firepit) and lake weed that has been floating around the dock. I figure it ought to rot really nice with all that water in it! I covered this with half of the dug up soil, and further mixed that soil with some left-over peat moss.

Then I did the same on the other half off the garden. A total of 8 buckets of weeds and 8 buckets of wood shavings went into that garden, and it still isn't raised very high.

After I levelled it out with a rake, I watered it until it was mostly flooded. I wanted that soil really good and wet before we planted anything in it. Over-watering also gave me an indication about where the low spots were in the garden. This enabled me to move soil around to fix those valleys before we started to plant.

Squee! I have a garden!!