My Square Foot Garden {Yee-haw!}

Howdy Ya'll! I've been busy getting my hands dirty!

What have we been doing? Turning our disaster of a backyard into a garden!

Here's a tip. When you are buying a house, DON'T go and look at houses in 3 feet of snow. You won't get a good picture of what your backyard really looks like. We loved the inside of the house and didn't bother to trudge outside in all that snow to look around the back. We just expected that under all that snow was a beautiful grassy lawn. When Spring came, we were shocked to find that our entire acre of a back yard didn't have any grass! It is basically a dry, weedy desert. We also didn't know that they had made a sort of junk yard in the back with all sorts of random junk for us to clean up, and an abandoned trailer house just behind our house. And such a lovely view. But, there's not much we can do about it now other than complain and whine and get no where, or plant our own grass and build a fence to block the ugly view. For the two years we have lived in this house, it has felt like a {absolutely depressing} unattainable dream. I have contemplated contacting HGTV for one of those fabulous yard makeovers...but I didn't think even they would want to tackle such a project.

Then, one day, my WONDERFUL Father-In-Law, Mark, came over and took a good look at our backyard. He picked up a hand full of dirt, let it fall out of his hand, smiled and said, "I think we can fix this."

A few days later, he came over with his tractors and got to work! It was SOOO much fun to watch!

He tilled up the ground and got rid of the weeds...

 

leveled it all out...

 

and the next step was to get rid of the rocks. I paid the kids one cent for each rock collected. Together, they gathered up over 600 rocks! (Voluntarily, I might add!)

Then we put down the 3 x 12 foot garden box. It's a LOT bigger than it looks in the picture! That's 36 square feet of garden space.

See those storage bins back there? FULL OF SHEEP POOP. Yes, one of the best garden fertilizers there is! Mark had a whole trailer full of it for their garden and shared some with me. :)

My soil is one part dirt from the yard, one part peat moss, and one part sheep poop. I mixed it all up in the box, gave it a good watering and then put my plants in.

I have sweet basil, rosemary, cilantro, dill, parsley, snap peas, green beans, carrots, broccoli, cherry tomatoes, regular tomatoes, green peppers, squash, zucchini, and cucumbers.

I also planted some raspberry and blueberry bushes, and made a 25 square foot strawberry patch!

Seriously, I am SOOOO over the moon that our disaster of a backyard is really turning into something beautiful and useful! 

(Thank you, Mark!)