It's always been my dream to be self sufficient. LOL. Literally, since I was a kid I had notebooks where I would draw out these sketches of my dream house and how it would be off the grid and I'd have a wheat field and (and it was a castle and it had a moat and a huge library) just like Little House on the Prarie. (Well, except for the castle part)
Anyway, now that I'm an adult who's doeced to live in reality I keep my dream alive by making our backyard as productive as possible.
This spring I undertook a HUGE investment and dug out all the crap soil (if you can even call giant chunks of iron clay a soil) and replaced it all with bags of SunGro potting mix from Hikiola. It only took a couple of afternoons, but it was hella expensive-like $200 worth of DIRT! 😱 and that was me scrimping and saving.
And yes, I did try mixing in organic matter first. I composted one bed at a time while I planted the other two, and even had my mobile chicken coop so one got constant "fertilizer" but I think the soil structure was so poor it just couldn't be improved.
Anyway, my one good bed is paying off! We have 4 or 5 types of tomatoes. Two types of watermelons (from saving seeds, so at least one plant is a sugar baby!) tomatillos!!!! Which, I've never grown tomatillos before, so that's new to me. Potatoes!!! Same, this is my first time growing potatoes. And strawberries, and a few peas and a few struggling pepper plants.
The other crap bed has a little lettuce (fingers crossed we don't get fat king worm) one recycled leek, some overflow tomatoes, tomatillos, and watermelon. One morning glory, some marigolds, and possibly one struggling flowering stock. My old stock died from and attack of spider mites that I didn't catch in time.
And our third bed was stupid, so we tore it out.
We do still have a narrow one on the edge of the shack. I bought one bag of potting mix and zinnia and cucumber seeds to put in there.
I kind of want to put in a Burpee's order because seeds are kind of hard to come by here and I want some cutting flowers!
So the garden finally looks good, now we need to work on the rest of our ugly yard. 😊