Grow your own: Here's to dirt | Bread & Butter

Today marked the beginning of my Grow Your Own series as Alex and I awoke to our first day of cultivation.

We started our down and dirty day by disassembling the much neglected butterfly garden that previously occupied the space behind our little shed (leftover from the previous owner of our house). After schlepping the antique brick border to the other side of the yard we plotted out what we thought would be a good garden size for us to maintain over the next coming months.

While I'm sure there's a formula and a technical way to figure out exactly how big your garden should be in relation to what you plan to grow, we eyeballed it, staking out roughly a 7x10 (ish) rectangle of earth to carve up with our borrowed tiller.

Thank god for tillers.

Don't let the photos fool you, I tilled the first pass of the garden myself: turning up rock after rock, chewing up old tree roots and churning up all sorts of random bits of metal in the yard of our 105 year old house. While wrestling the tiller as it bucked over rocks and wood I couldn't help but picture oxen plowing fields in years before my house was even built.


After a second pass with the tiller we picked 3 buckets of golf ball sized rocks out of the soon-to-be garden before spreading five bags of Miracle-Gro Vegetable Garden soil along with a bag of peat moss to help enrich our little plot. We could probably use a little more soil, but planting is a little way off so I figure we've got some more time to pile it on.



Alex finished our day of hard labor by tilling the soil for the third and final time, turning our new soil into our existing.

We ended our day by pseudo relaxing on our back porch while we planted our seedlings in their seed starter green houses: beef steak tomatoes, jalapenos, grape tomatoes, Anaheim chilies, hot wax, cayenne and sweet peppers... We also decided to try our hand at growing spinach, asparagus and shallots which don't need to be started indoors first and will be planted later.


Here's to dirty hands, dirty knees and green thumbs!