Making my Garden at the Homestead

 This is a picture of my garden when I started. There was a dog run between the coach house and the garden which I took out so it is now one big space. As you can see it is overrun with weeds. Making it worse is that the ground is full of roots a lot of them from Rasberry bushes which make it difficult to rototill.

I'm putting in a rainbarrel system at the back. There is no water to the coach house so rather than haul a hose out everytime I want to water I'm hooking up four rainbarrels which will be filled from the downspout of the eavestrough I'm going to install.

After taking out the weeds with my brush cutter I rototilled the soil. It was so hard that I had to make five separate passes over it lowering my tiller by one inch at a time. I dumped 16 big 3 cubic feet bags of peatmoss onto the original soil which you can see from this picture and some below. And then I tilled the peatmoss into the original soil.

After tilling in the peat moss I bought 25 yards of triple mix top soil. I have a small trailer behind my riding lawn mower and it took 75 loads of this soil to top dress the garden. Each load is about 50 shovel fulls of earth. I went through about half of this soil. The rest will get used around the yard ... trust me.

View of the garden with the dog run gone.

The following pictures show the peat moss after it was tilled into the soil.

Once the peat was tilled into the original soil I added about 6 inches of triple mix on top of the soil and man o man it was a lot of work. It took about 75 loads in my small trailer. I'm getting lots of use of the equipment I bought.

 
This is the finished garden after I rototilled in the top soil. I used the big rototiller first and then I used my small tiller to clean up the rows. Looks neat and tidy at this point.

Iris's ... NOT in my vegetable garden but pretty so I took some pics.

The planting begins. I went way overboard on plants. I must have over 50 tomato plants alone. I thought the garden was huge but I'm already running out of room. Some of these tomotoes might go. Too many to eat.

I divided the garden into four foot wide sections and found some old rubber mats to put in between the rows to walk on. They have holes in them so it will allow water to flows through and they are light so I can just pick them up and move them if necessary or when the garden is finished this fall.

I got five of the seven sections planted up. I actually am running out of room so may have to re-think some things. Definitely fewer tomotoes plants next year. I marked most of them so we can determine which are tastiest and stick to half as many next year.

Life is good ... ENJOY

Dennis