the blog at eric moon dot net

Coming soon from Moon Farms

After talking about it every spring for the past ten years, it’s finally happened! Yes, despite our horrible climate and soil to grow anything other than weeds and cactus, we now have a teeny tiny vegetable garden.

I wish I could say we have been planning this for some time by working the soil, building up our compost reserves,  locating just the right spot in the backyard for sun and drainage, designing it to fit with our future landscape plans… but I can’t.  It came about the way these things often do in our home;  I came home last Saturday after a 4 hour bike ride and, magically, there was a small tray of seedlings on the kitchen counter, waiting to be put into the ground.

It being a nice spring day, we grabbed some shovels and set out to the wilderness that is our backyard.  It’s a small city lot, so it’s not a vast wilderness, but considering it has been completely and totally neglected for the past 3-4 years, it’s pretty dang wild, with all kinds of flora (at least 5 types of noxious weeds) and fauna (we got both raccoons and opossums.) Please note that I only take responsibility for the last 10 months or so.

We randomly picked a spot smack dab in the middle of the back yard, and started turning the soil.  I was worried that we’d be digging through clay and rock since the only thing growing there were some scraggly weeds, but it turned out the soil wasn’t half bad.  At least it looked ok, for all we know it could be a potential superfund site.

Wilderness Preserve or Backyard?

Shovels just weren’t cutting it, and the short, heavy pick-axe I was using as a makeshift hoe was starting to break my back, so it was off to the Home Depot to get an honest-to-goodness hoe.  (Free tip:  the quality of Home Depot garden tools is slightly below ‘pure garbage’. On the plus side, it was only 10 bucks so I won’t feel bad when I have to throw it out in a year).   A few bags of ‘enriched’ topsoil (shhh, don’t tell the organic police) in the truck,  and I was on my way back home in the setting sun to finish the prep work.  We hoed and raked and shoveled for the next 45 minutes to mix up the new soil, the old soil and the weeds I was too lazy to pull.  Weeds buried in soil is almost the same as compost, right?

Sure is dark out here. In the garden. Yup.

Time to plant! In case you haven’t been following the time-line of this garden epic thus far,  let me just point out that it was now dark;  this wasn’t sunlight-is-fading-but-I-can-still-mostly-see dark, but it’s-night-go-inside-can’t-see-your-hand dark.  For some reason, I am always doing projects outside when it’s dark.  Installing sewer pumps, adding remote controls to lights, you name it, it’s always pitch black when I finish.  Some might say it’s my uncanny ability to massively under-estimate the time required to complete  projects, but I prefer to think of it as my inspiring drive to finish them, no matter what obstacles get in my way.

Either way, it was dark, and we were using flashlights to plant some heirloom tomatoes (moonglow variety – how appropriate), lemon basil and some type of  peppers that are medium-hot according to the tag.   A cozy little 8′ x 4′ plot of garden just about done.  I still had to go back to the Home Depot to grab some landscape timbers the next day.  And of course install them under the cover of night.

Since it’s still cool (under 90 degrees), we have been doing a good job this first week of gardening.  Stay tuned for the bountiful harvest report.  Either that or pictures of dead vegetable plants covered with a layer of new weeds.  It could go either way.

Top Secret Garden Plans

Tags: Austin Texas, DIY, Garden, homeowner

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at 9:05 pm and is filed under DIY, Joys of the Homeowner.