The Garden

This year we got brave and decided to expand our garden. I anticipated this to be a much easier project than it has ended up to be. It all started with our lovely Texas soil. It is a clay soil that when wet, turns to mud but when that dries, you guessed it...CEMENT! So, we wanted to avoid digging out the grass and having to deal with that yucky soil. Someone told us we could just lay 4-6 sheets of newspaper over the grass, add about 6 inches of good soil, and voila, it's ready to plant! Sounds good in theory but trying to do this on a windy day was a little difficult. It was definitely a family effort as we held newspaper in place and covered it with soil. Our plot of land is also not level so we had to spend time terracing it so the water would drain properly. Then we had to rabbit-proof and dog-proof the garden. This involved adding "iron" fencing and reinforcing it with plastic netting.

Finally it was time to determine what to plant. We each made a list of fruits and vegetables we liked to eat. We compared lists, crossed off the things that would not grow here (like grapefruit, bananas, and oranges) and decided what to plant. This past Saturday (after we were all warmed up from running the 5k, attending Hailey's soccer game and JP's football game) we planted the garden. Monday, we received about 2 inches of rain. We'll see if we end up with corn on the cob, lettuce, and carrots all throughout the yard as the seeds were washed who knows where!!!

Well, it was fun anyway. We are excited to see what survives to be harvested!