Planting Day!

Today we planted! It was an exciting prospect for us, having put so much work in such a short time into our new garden. Yvonne took a Tiffany & Co. box someone had given us a gift in, and using some paper and tape turned it into a perfect seed box. From left her organization was greens, vegetables and herbs. She plans on bifurcating each section in time for the spring seeds.

But Yvonne's organization didn't stop there, nosireeBob. A new garden meant exciting and endless opportunities for planning, research, more planning and organizing everything into a neat binder. Of course we'll both reap the rewards of her organiztional sickness, er, talents.

Because she'd diagrammed the garden out, we knew exactly what was going to go where and what size. We both wanted a central walking area down the middle. It was also important that we had half of the garden space reserved for walkways, which will make tending and harvesting the garden a snap. Yvonne used the rake to even out the bed and walkway areas while I installed the fence.

Luckily I hadn't thrown away this nappy little green fencing the previous tenants left behind. They used the fence as a doggie corral. We're using it to keep rabbits and neighborhood kitties out of our veggie patch!

We demarcated our walkways with sticks. Then it was time to plant the seeds. We decided to plant in beds rather than rows, since we can maximize our space that way. We have beautiful 26-inch beds. We spread the seeds out in the beds, tapped the seeds into the soil with a hoe, then raked dirt from the walkways over the seeds. Finally we used the back of the bow rake to smooth and even out the dirt on top.

We made 10 planting beds and planted 9 of the 10 today: lettuce, Swiss chard, collards, spinach, carrots, beets, beans, broccoli & cucumbers. We'll plant the yellow squash when Y gets the seeds this week.

Yvonne found us a free wheelbarrow on Freecycle.org, which was perfect for collecting garden tools to put away, not to mention moving mulch. A gardening book that showed us how to use the bed method also recommended organic mulching in the walk-rows. It'll help retain moisture in the garden as a whole, and keep our shoes from being so muddy when we work the garden. Also it helps to distinguish the planting beds from the walk-rows. We'll mulch in-between the plants themselves if we're still in a bad drought and only after they're well established, which is what the NC Cooperative Extension Service recommends.

The yellow jackets left us alone during the entire process over the past couple of weekends. As I was finishing up the last mulch row, I got bitten by a nasty little ant, a fire ant I presume, which really hurt like a booger. Now we water and wait!

~T