Vegetable Garden

A nice day spent working outside in the yard is about the closest thing there is to heaven. The kids play in blissful ignorance of the trials of everyday life. I can focus on simple, repetitive tasks that have visible results. And it helps bring balance to my life now that I spend days and days working indoors with technology.

We'll be putting in our vegetable garden this weekend. We have a twenty food wide strip of land on the north side of our property that receives sun most of the day. Unfortunately, it looks like that area may have once been a gravel parking lot for the greenhouses. The top three inches or so are black dirt, but beneath that is a two inch layer of crushed, hard packed gravel. Underneath that is more good soil. The gravel was impenetrable to our little tiller, so I don't know how the vegetables are going to deal with it. If they can get through the gravel, they should have access to all kinds of great nutrients.

Tilling did dislodge a large crop of egg size rocks, meaning we'll be picking rocks out of our garden for quite some time. I've started moving our compost pile out to the garden to add some soil depth and richness. As of last night, I've moved about half of the compost pile. We'll see if it helps.

Yesterday I bought a Rotozip in hopes that it will allow me to cut out the rotten sections of soffit beadboard. After playing with it last night, I can already see that I'll need to create a jig with a straight edge. Looking at my "straight" cuts, you'd think that I had been drinking.