Friday, April 30, 2010

For an Abundance of the Fruits of the Earth

Let us pray to the Lord!

Inspired by my fellow bloggers' garden plans, I decided to post our little garden plot for this Spring.



We started 3 years ago with a 4 x 8 plot, based on Square-Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew. It is the plot you see in the foreground of the photo. Although you could just add all new bagged ingredients into your bed, we (well, my dad and husband) dug up a little of our own soil and mixed it with topsoil, compost, peat, and cow manure. That way we didn't have to purchase as many bags.

This year we added a 3 ft. by 8 ft. raised bed behind it, with (drum roll, please......) TRELLISES! We had watched this video from our local library over the winter. Watched isn't accurate. We stalked this video. We watched it again and again and rewound certain sections, scribbling down measurements and tips. We watched it with building excitement (my son is my Little Builder after all). We watched it with growing confidence that we could actually do this. We re-checked it out of the library so many times they wouldn't let us renew it anymore.

Then we waited until it would quit raining already!

Over Spring Break, we built the new bed and trellis. Those pvc pipe pieces are nestling garden netting between them. After adding seeds and seedlings, we pinned in place a soaker hose, attached to a manual timer for easy, consistent watering. This bed is far away from the house, down by the sunny road,

To the left of the original bed are my pots of herbs and flowers, with some irises planted in the ground.

This is our Gift from God, and whenever I drive by it on the way out, I bless it with the sign of the cross and repeat the prayer from the Great Litany of Peace for an abundance of crops.