Breaking Ground

It started with a stake out, as in staking out 3 plots of 5 feet by 12 feet to become the first raised beds in our garden. Stake outs in this part of Virginia are hard work, especially when the soil is packed clay and solid from months of incessant heat. Thankfully though the temperatures from the height of summer have started to cool off and have been accompanied by increasing amounts of rain. Yesterday it rained for a soild 10 hours, most of which time I spent at the Virginia Craft Brewers Festival hosted by Devils' Backbone, where I was judging beer.

When it rains so heavily our garden becomes a mass of rivulets of water heading toward the lowest point of the neighbourhood, it also makes the top few inches of the soil moist enough to actually get stuck into it, without getting stuck in it. That's what we did this morning, started clearing the grass out of the plots, most of which came up with plenty of roots and hence got transplated to parts of the garden needing some greenery.

As you can kind of see from the picture, we got one plot completely done with, de-grassed and forked over, as well as making a start on plot two. Eventually when all three plots are broken up, we'll build the wooden frames which will keep in the soil. I am planning to have the frames be at least 8 inches high, so that we can dump in plenty of manure and compost to sit over the winter and get rotted in. Come spring next year the plan is to have beds with a good growing medium for crops of beans, tomatoes and whatever else we will grow to cut down on our grocery bill.

While we have only 3 beds at the moment, the long term plan is to expand out to at least 10 for vegetables, as well as a few plots for fruit bushes and trees, in particular I want to try my hand at growing that most magnificent of fruit, the gooseberry.