Gardening - Week 2

Planning and prep work for our flower and vegetable gardens has become a major part of our days.  The blessing has been that each day had been a sunny, cool, and beautiful one this week.

We continue to pull weeds and clear away rocks as we fill up several trash containers to be hauled away by our bi-weekly environmental trash pick-up. 

 The flower garden side.

The vegetable beds from last year.

Due to the planned addition of a third raised vegetable bed, we pulled up the garden fence in order to re-install it.  We will be using improved fence stakes and fence staples this year.  The vegetable garden fence is necessary to keep out the rabbits that abound in our neighborhood. 

We also plan on laying down plastic coated mesh on the floor of the vegetable beds, prior to filling them with amended soil, in order to help keep out the gophers.  We lost our honeydew and pumpkin plants last year to gophers.

Another improvement is the addition of a composter.  The boys picked it up and assembled it the same day.  It's pretty cool as it sits off the ground and rotates in order to mix the compost.

We were excited to see the Mammoth Sunflowers sprout only seven days from planting the seeds.  It was good to know we had done the germination process correctly.

Testing the soil was another improvement upon last year's gardening efforts.  We discovered that the soil was severely deficient of nitrogen, phosphorous and potash, but the pH level was great!

Although we are growing most of our vegetables from seed, we have purchased some "in pot" additions.

 "Fred", my Max Pumpkin!

 Strawberries.

Blueberry, blackberry, and raspberry plants.

It will be interesting to see our progress as we come back to review the weekly summary, in this photo blog, of our gardening project.  So exciting!