More garden pics

K planted our herb seeds all by herself.


She also helped a lot with the tilling, which is pretty damn hard work.

Our first veggies! Broccoli, cherry tomatoes, tomatoes, and various kinds of lettuces.

Garden, in progress

Yay! Gardening got done! More to come, but dammit man, this was good for four hours!

The tower which will allow red wriggler worms to convert food waste into beautiful compost.

Our friends, the red wrigglers,


This was a slice of bread a few days ago. Now it is mostly worm poo.

Onions soon .

My babies, the red potatoes I finally got planted.

Countdown

The countdown timer tool went down, I should have a new one up soon...

Updates via pictures and captions

Aspall English draft cider is, unfortunately, one of the less interesting I've had. The label says "medium," so maybe that's code for neither crisp nor sweet. The Peeps and the chips made it a good evening, though.


Clearing 40+ years of sod by hand was no easy task, but my wife was up to the challenge of taking pictures of me while I did it.


I'm either offering her a worm, or begging for help. Either way, my request went unanswered.


Ta-da! One bald square of land! All I need to do now is assemble the cinder blocks and boards into a foundation, fill it with soil and compost, and transfer seedlings into it.

And in other good gardening news, our first strawberry plant has already grown a couple of inches! Jam, anyone?

We're farmers!

Our sustainable home garden got under way today!

Actually, for K's birthday I got her a book on gardening, seeds for her favorite veggies and herbs, and several other gardening staples as gifts. We have mutual goals of planting a garden this year, and even though I have a smidgen of experience in the area, I wanted her to get comfortable and learn as much as she could. I also need some refreshers, as I used to have a bit of a green thumb, and lately I've managed to kill every plant I touch. Seriously, I got a free tree from the Arbor Day Foundation in the mail, and all I had to do was plant it. I killed it before it ever saw soil. Not only that, but they mailed it to me in a cardboard box, so technically I killed two trees. Maybe we should stop investing in this...

Brown thumbs or not, we're really excited about this journey. Gardening at home creates more than just chores, which as we all know, keep our hands dirty and our thoughts pure. (Thank you Catholic school!) It provides food, saves money at the grocery store, reduces our carbon footprint, educates us about the land we live on and our interactions with nature, gets us outside, keeps our yard looking decent, helps us spend time together, gives us common goals, and makes us feel really, really good.

Today's was a small step, but I raked up some of the many layers of guck that has accumulated in our yard as the result of disinterest by previous tenants, and we got some plants in the ground. Our first McKinney Family Garden plant was a Rainier strawberry, which will ideally help cover a large bald patch in our back yard, as well as provide us with juicy strawberries throughout the season. We also planted a soft, pretty ground cover nearby to share the burden of making this huge bald patch more lush and attractive.

Tomorrow (4/5/09), we're planting some seeds in a starter greenhouse, and Kat is emptying what has been a sad little flower box on our porch in order to put in a functional herb garden. In the coming days, we will be building a "raised bed" garden to plant various vegetables, as well as starting at least a couple of container gardens. Stay tuned!

She's a waterin' fool!

With a little good luck, we'll be eating strawberries from this little guy in a month or so. If no luck, we will go strawberryless. With bad luck, this variety grows poisonous strawberries.

She always grins this big when she's massaging the roots of small potted plants. Also when she vacuums. It's weird...