Day 14: Garden of Manly Delight

Yesterday was a big day- the boxes became beds to house our wonderful veggies that are sprouting. Bill and I went out to in the AM to get our materials for what's described in the SFG book as "Mel's Magic Mix". While that sounds like something you'd probably buy on a street corner, it actually means a 1:1:1 ratio of peat, compost/manure, and vermiculite. Since we have 3 garden boxes that hold about 8 cubic feet of material, we had to get a LOT of each of the ingredients. We ended up with 9 cuft of peat, about 9 cuft of two different types of compost, and 8 cuft of vermiculite (which we had to order online, since it's a rare and expensive commodity in big-box stores). The other thing that we purchased to go into these beds was pea-stone. The small river pebbles line the bottoms of the beds for proper drainage to avoid root-rot and total garden meltdown. So, 16 bags of stone, 3 large bags of peat, 9 bags of compost, and 2 unruly bags of vermiculite had to be hauled into our backyard, which is about 1.5 stories higher than our garage. My back started cringing when I was doing that math.

Time to call in the Crazy Js.

Our friends Jared and Jake came over yesterday afternoon to help us schlep bags and mix the soil for the beds, in exchange for a cookout dinner and cookies (and rock band and beer, but that's kind of only remotely related to helping). Without Jared's muscle man power Bill and I would have been pronate on the ground in about 3 trips with all that stuff. Seriously, I have no idea where he gets his strength (other than the fact that I know he goes to the gym on a daily basis), but it did our garden good.



First, the pea-stone. Each bed took about 5 bags of rock to cover the bottom.

OH, also. See those black things in the middle of each side of the box? Those are garden stakes. Using those and some short screws, we firmly anchored the boxes into the ground, and placed large stones in the corners to even out the gradation so the stone wouldn't pour out of an uneven side.



Next, the weed barrier. According to our SFG book, we did these first two steps backwards, but we pooh-poohed their ideology with the barrier on the ground. First, the soil would unevenly seep into the rocks and we'd lose precious growing volume, and then we might have had issues with un-evenness of drainage with the weed mat acting like a tarp on our concrete-like ground. Sorry Mel, sometimes we have to take matters into our own hands.



Jared and Bill came up with a method for mixing in the beds that worked really well. Mel suggests to place each of the ingredients into a large tarp, and then fold the tarp in half, unfold, rotating corners, until everything is well homogenized. That would have taken hours. We're not fans of ANYTHING taking hours, especially when there's a grill to be fired up and rock band to be played. So we mixed the batch in two layers, wetting each down as we went so we weren't inhaling the pulverized rock and peat:



First, the heavy wet stuff- compost/manure mix. We used two different brands of this and blended them to get a better, well-rounded balance of nutrients.



Then, the peat...



And finally the vermiculite. Lather, rinse, repeat for the final layer on top.



With the four of us, it took no time at all to mix the soil (by hand, on our hands and knees on the ground- we got niiiiiice and dirty...).



Ta-da! Our beds are ready for slats and plants!

It's pouring today, so we're really taking the drainage system for a test drive. Plus, the Mix will have plenty of time to get settled in. ETA for planting some things outside: Wednesday.