Since we are featuring gardening ideas this week, here is an older post showing Tawra’s house when they first moved in and how they set up their garden beds for square foot gardening. If you have seen her recent pictures of the house, you can see how far they have come.
We have been working on the gardens each weekend and it has been some hard work! Right after we moved in, we had to replace our septic system and afterwards, the yard was a big muddy mess. We are first working on the septic tank mess.
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Here is the "before" picture, where we started outlining the garden with the free bricks we got. You can see all the dirt where they dug for the septic tank and it’s just a mud pit! My motto is, where’s there’s mud there’s a potential garden! :-)
Here is the area over the drain field for the septic system. I’m going to try and put in a huge drought tolerant perennial bed. I was going to try and do it all this year but I think my dreams are bigger than my or Mike’s energy. You can see he started rototilling in the front and then the tiller broke. We are going to have to wait until we can fix it to get the rest done. It’s just too hard to hand dig. BJ is going to put his Giant Pumpkins in the back.
This is how it looked after we got the compost filled in. We just decided to do everything as raised beds because the ground is such hard clay it’s not worth digging unless we dig it out. We are going to cut down the septic tank vents so they don’t stick out so much. All that is right on top of where they put in the new septic tank.
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This is our raised beds for our vegetables. We are going to make four raised beds this year and then, if we need more later, we will add them. I am doing my favorite method of gardening, Square Foot Gardening. It is SOOO much less work than traditional gardening!
Of course my wonderful husband did all the digging to get the bed straight and then he hauled and filled in with compost. He has worked hard but once it’s in, then it’s easy!
For all the paths, we are putting down newspaper or cardboard and then mulching with free wood chips.
That’s our start for this year!
-Tawra
Elizabeth, your advice about using gypsum for clay soil caught my attention. I was wondering if it’s ok to use the gypsum around plants that are already growing in the clay?
Joyce one thing if you can find scraps of regular sheet rock, you can break it up and use too. That is what Tawra uses because sheet rock is made of gypsum. I think she usually puts that stuff on the soil during the fall so it has all winter to break down.
Hi Joyce:
Yes, absolutely. Another name for it is Calcium Sulfate and it’s been used as a Fertilizer and soil conditioner for centuries. It can also be used on your lawn to soften the soil, to help it better absorb water and avoid compaction problems which many people attempt to resolve using aeration.
Thank you to Jill and Elizabeth for your answers. They’re a lot of help. Now to just get it done. Thanks again.