Taking Back the Front Yard and Giving Back a Garden

I am so freaking excited! Just ordered my first bunch of seeds for the garden. I even went out and bought me a new hoe. Looked at all of them to make sure I had the perfect one, like you do. Satisfied, I was ready to get out and cut up some ground.

I decided to start working the areas of soil that get sun and make rows where the shadows from the trees fall. I figure we're probably going to have... a drought this year. And when we get rain, we may get a lot of it and have flooding and runoff. So how well my garden will grow this year? Haven't got a clue. But it will keep me out of the looneybin, maybe, just.

The sun is out so I'm going to start digging. It is going to feel so good to have dirt under my finger nails again. I'm going to sow seeds in swirly areas and mix them up a bit so all kinds of bugs will help keep a balance in the garden. I wish I had some chickens.

First, 5 gallon buckets with lids. After some coffee I ran some errands and when I say I ran some errands and got back to the house with all kinds of shit, I really mean it. I was in back of a barn filling up buckets of horse, donkey and goat manure for the garden.

Tomorrow I'll take a bucket and blend it with some good soil out back. Then I'll let it rest for a few days and start by soaking some of my dried tomato seeds and other seeds and plant them in empty cardboard egg cartons I've been saving all year. By the end of the week they'll be well misted and set under every window in the house.

I ordered Cheyenne Bush Pumpkin, Jacob's Cattle Beans, Tarahumara Sunflowers, Blue Solaise Onions, Smoke Signal Corn, Tom Thumb Popcorn, Waltham Butternut, Amish Cantelope, Stone Mountain Watermelon, and Ailsa Craig, Cilantro and Yellow Daisies (I refuse to call them Black Eyed Susans). I'm going to start cutting out areas in the front yard and fill the rows with manure and make little hills for the squirrels to play through. I hope it entertains them.

I'm excited about making wavy rows that branch out from the center of the front yard and will grow downhill toward the full sun. I plan on letting them go until they run to the road and then some if they have the inclination. I'll be transplanting some raspberry bushes to start a bramble in the front yard too. And I'll be using branches from the Hickory Tree, that fell in the storms last year as fence posts and then weave branches and string and ribbons between them and that is where I'm going to grow some of my raspberries. I'll be growing most of my beans along the fence in the backyard. And I'll be planting flowers - everywhere.

I'll be posting pics and videos as my garden grows. Here is a video of the first stage of making my front yard and garden.


More seeds for the next two months but this is what will be keeping me busy in March. There are buds starting to pop on the branches of the Elm and Ash, Maple and Hickory trees. So its time to start my seeds. Don't need a book or calendar when nature speaks.