discwiz

Due to circumstances beyond my control, I'm home from work today. (it's nothing exciting, they just needed my desk for training) Anyway, it was supposed to rain, but instead I've had a mostly sunny beautiful day. So, I decided to continue my garden. I went over to home depot and was excited to see they restocked the dirt. Isn't funny that I even have to buy dirt and can't just get it from the ground? Oh well... I picked up 4 bags of 2 cubic feet of dirt. Those bags are soooo heavy. I'm sure all the guys were getting a kick out of me trying to pick them up and throw them into the mini. The mini, btw, works great as a little pickup truck if you lay down the seats. It fit the bags of dirt easily and could have fit more stuff. Lifting the dirt into my car was only half the battle, once home, i had to walk it around the side of our house and into the backyard. This was by far the hardest part of creating the garden so far. If I have to move dirt in the future, i'm going back to the 1 cubic feet of dirt bags.

I used three of the bags to fill up the garden and then planted some herbs! Can you tell which ones the nursery started and which ones I grew in my little greenhouse inside? I know you're supposed to grow them a little larger inside before planting them outside, but i couldn't resist!

Now... what to plant in the rest of the garden?!

Don't fear! I still have rosemary, chives, and serrano peppers growing inside that will go in the garden and I'm thinking about getting some tomatoes since I have so much space!

Posted by discwiz at 2:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Sunday Jason and I got up super early to hit home depot before the craziness started. We got there just after 9 and it was getting busy fast. As soon as we arrived, someone took the last home depot loaner truck. We were hoping to use one to get the bricks and dirt home, but instead we had to sully jason's pretty trunk. We ended up getting regular bricks for the retaining wall because they are a quarter of the cost of the "retaining wall" bricks. We also decided to come back later for dirt, since the bricks pretty much filled up his trunk.

I went off to do more lady stuff at the baby shower. While I was gone Jason built me a beautiful retaining wall. Of course he told me that it was too bright for him to work, so he wasn't going to do it until he got his sunglasses from the Hoover's, but lucky for him he was just giving me a hard time :)

So, we headed off to home depot again to get some dirt. They were pretty much sold out of any kind of garden soil you could want, except for on the top top shelf. They had 1 pallet left. That's right home depot was out of dirt. We convinced some of the workers to pull down the pallet for us so that we could get 12 bags. We lugged the bags home and dumped them into my new garden.

Unfortunately, we're still about 6 bags short I think. But this is a great start. I'm hoping to get more dirt in the next few days, then I'll start planting this weekend. You can see my pre-planted herbs from the nursery in the upper left corner of the pic. Oh yeah, and if you'll notice, the sod is gone and the weeds are gone. After filling the hole with dirt, we mowed the grass, edged the yard and carried the sod out to the common area so that nice grass can grow out there.

Posted by discwiz at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Saturday after fun ladies stuff, I set out to attack the backyard. I got a new shovel at home depot earlier in the week that I've heard is good for removing sod and stuff. It seemed to work really well if anyone needs to borrow it. Ok, so everyone I talked to, encouraging or not, said that it would be extremely difficult to pull up the sod. I had suggestions for big machinery that would remove it, contraptions that cut roots, etc. Keep in mind, I'm only making a garden that is 6x5! I thought I'd try the shovel first and if it didn't work, try a fancy contraption. After about an hour and a half, my sod was removed, my back wasn't sore and I only spent a total of $12 on a shovel. No fancy machinery needed. (you can see my piles of sod on each side)

I did find some interesting things in my yard... pieces of brick, huge rocks, and this:

Everyone I talked to insisted that I needed a tiller, so, I rented one from Capital Rentals. They dropped it off Friday afternoon and picked it up Monday morning. It was extremely convenient. So, I tilled a bit of fancy vegetable food (manure) into the hole I dug with the tiller and pulled up a bunch of rocks that were hiding right under the ground. It took a few minutes to figure out the tiller, but it wasn't bad to use. Here's the tilled result:

After that I went over to the nursery to get some flowers for the rest of my yard and check out their herb selections. Since I've only started growing basil, serrano peppers, and some other things, I wanted to see if the nursery had anything started that I could plant. I ended up getting sage, tarragon, thyme, and oregano. I thought that I had done enough work for one night and Jason was a bit tired from the poker tourney, so we decided to get bricks for my retaining wall in the morning.

Posted by discwiz at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This weekend promises to be very busy. I'm going to start my herb and veggie garden. I've been getting advice from every "expert" at the office, in everyone's opinion I should have started sooner, won't be able to grow stuff, have bad pH for growing stuff, etc. With all the encouragement, I'm just going to dig in. (Actually, that's the opinion of Jason's nemesis, everyone else is very encouraging) Here is my pre-garden backyard. For the next two days, I'll be "scraping" off the sod, tilling the dirt, framing it, and filling it with lots and lots of dirt.

(Never-mind those weeds, I'll get to those once the garden is rocking)

Posted by discwiz at 10:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Sunday, Jason bought me some seeds so that I can get my green thumb on this spring. So, we made a little makeshift greenhouse and today I already got my first sprout!! Once they get a bit bigger I'm going to move them outside, either into a pot or the ground if I'm adventurous enough! To start with we are growing basil, chives, rosemary, and serrano peppers.

Here's my sprout:

And here's my little greenhouse:

Posted by discwiz at 10:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My pictures from the beach trip are loaded to flickr. Soon to follow are yelp reviews for all of the restaurants we visited!

Posted by discwiz at 10:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)