Building a better tomorrow (giggle)

Yes, OK, that title is totally cornball, but I thought of it and it just stuck.

This weekend, S and I did do a little building, not to mention a bit of planting, moving ourselves down the sustainability road.

As I mentioned in a previous post, we decided to do square foot gardening this year. After two days of effort we are practically there! Behold the beauty.


Even Sterling approves!

Saturday morning we began our adventure by gathering a bunch of this ...


(don't let anyone ever fool you into thinking that a Prius is a small car ... you wouldn't believe how much we can fit into our little baby!)


And in no time, thanks to S's fabulous carpentry skills, we had this.

Then we had to do some "making." That is, we had to make some soil.


First you put it all in a bowl on a tarp ...


then you mix it all together. The square foot gardening book has some great suggestions for doing this. We did this several times, filled up the boxes with soil and then out of my mouth came the words "we should go ahead and wet these down now." I kid you not, within 5 seconds the sky opening and this happened.


Can you see that action ... do you see those white streaks coming down from the sky ... nope, not meteorites, HAIL. Hail in Southern California. It was quite unbelievable!


Here's a photo up close of some of the early pieces ... smaller than dimes, but there was A LOT of them. Hail did eventually turn to rain and our garden got a great little drink. I take this as a very positive sign from Mother Nature ... ask and you shall receive... nitrogen rich rain!

Sunday morning we were back out bright and early, finished filling up the third and final box, affixed the remainder of the square foot markers (the grid system) and then planted plants.


So far we have carrots, cilantro, red onion, green bunching onions, leaf lettuce, spinach, cauliflower (left bed), corn, tomatos, and marigold (middle bed), cucumbers, bok choi, red peppers, japanese eggplant, & butternut squash (right bed). I have okra and beet seeds I'll plant later tonight. We still need to shop around a bit more to find potatoes, broccoli, garlic, and bush beans. Very exciting stuff you guys.

And because we want to sit outside and enjoy every minute of this garden, we replaced our patio table that was murdered earlier this year.


Here's to dining al fresco on locally grown food all summer long!