The Garden

Today I thought I would write some about our garden. We have lived in our house for 5 years now...it has been lots of work and we didnt really have time for a garden until last year. Of course I had visions of a grand garden. I called to have the power company come out and check the area where we wanted to have the garden..."Call Before You Dig". All was ok, we were going to rent a tiller, but of course I couldnt wait. The weather was nice so I grabbed a shovel, some gloves and the radio. Probably the second scoop that I took, scrape....hmmmm. Dropping to my knees to investigate and thankful that I had on my gloves....glass & lots of it. Dig a bit more and more glass. As I go deeper the pieces are larger...I am unearthing complete canning jars (some with lids) and old medicine bottles. HUH? Break time and off to the computer to investigate. Seems that back in the day when outhouses were used trash would be tossed down the hole. Tilling was not an option, I couldnt imagine gardening amongst shards of glass. I did however have a roll of landscaping fabric. Unrolling the fabric to 8' (the width of the garden) I marked where I would place the plants and cut an "x" in the fabric. Using some bricks to hold down the end of the fabric I folded it back on itself and dug a hole just big enough for the plant. The fabric was then stretched back out, plants put in the ground through the "x" in the fabric. The garden measures 8'x26' and I planted most of the plants using this method. As I worked my way down the garden and got to the end there was less glass...the last 2 rows were used for bush green beans (no landscape fabric used) To hold down all of this fabric I used shavings from the stalls. We have a 45'63 Cleary Building that was a disaster when we moved here...it was put up in 1999 and is nice, but the people that lived here prior to us had 14 horses. The neighbors told us they put them loose in the barn. There was straw, manure and hay bits all over in there...some spots were at least a foot deep. We cleaned out a spot in there for our animals, but some of that mess had to wait. Being there are only 2 of us to handle that mess it toook quite a while to get it cleaned out, but I managed to get the last of it out of there last year. By then it was composted nicely and worked great to hold down the fabric, it provided some nutrients to the plants, held the fabric down which killed off the sod underneath. There were virtually no weeds. This year I removed the fabric and put newspaper down which I saved all winter, more winter stall waste was put on top to hold down the paper. A bit more weeds this year, but we did double the garden size...now there are two 8'x26' sections. Things are growing nicely!