The P-O Garden, Day One

We have a NEW PROJECT!

We have a small garden on the east side of our house. It measures 5' x 20'. Today we decided to ACT! We are doing our part to reduce our carbon footprint. I am not sure how this reduces it, but they say it reduces it. We made 3 trips to the store, rented a gas-powered tiller, added a bunch of chemicals to the groundwater and bought a big plastic wheelbarrow thing. By my calculation, we will need to produce enough vegetables to feed 1/3 of Phoenix for six months to offset the imprint we left preparing this garden.

And we still have to successfully grow edible plants.

Here is Maggie doing her part. Manual labor! She really (seriously, really) worked HARD all day. We had to remove about 2 metric tons of rocks from this little plot of land. Maggie had the hard part. She had to dig through the dirt and pick out the rocks. The girls helped at first... But then Cate needed babysitting or something, and that was over. But they did help. Really.

And here I am, doing MY part. I believe this is the part where we get a little behind in the carbon footprint calculations. I ran this thing for about two hours. You see, I had to did way down to get the rocks that Maggie and girls had to pick out of the dirt. It looks easy, but let me tell you... it was a lot of fun!!!

This is what it looked like before the final tilling. We used the tiller to mix all of this together. We added about 25 c.f. of soil amendment, plus some chemicals to counter the HIGHLY acidic soils we have in Arizona. The soil itself has a lot of clay in it, so the amendment is primarily for drainage purposes.

We look forward to showing you pictures of green things in about a month. We can't plant for a week.

We are taking orders for carrots, lettuce(s), turnips (Maggie says so), and other things I haven't been told about yet.