Thursday, March 13, 2014

Dirt farmer




An unrelated, but great album

As I mentioned in the last post, when we ripped out the landscaping in our yard we found a lot of crap...rocks, broken bricks, glass, etc.  Also, we had heard from neighbors that our yard may have previously been a dump, which was worrying.  To get to the bottom of this, we called Alexandria City Hall, who told us that our yard hadn't been a dump site of any kind.  Still, not really prime gardening material.  So last fall we tried to beef up our soil.

The original plan was to buy fresh fill dirt from one of the many landscaping businesses.  But we needed 2-3 pickup truck loads, which would have cost a couple hundred dollars.  In the process of shopping around for cheap fill dirt, I stumbled across a couple of great resources for DC-area gardeners:  the Master Gardeners of Northern Virginia (http://mgnv.org/) and the UVA ag extension office.

A lady from MGNV recommended that instead of buying fill dirt we improve our soil by adding organic matter.  So over the winter we've added organic matter in 3 ways.  First, we compost all of our food scraps with this:



We manage to fill it up about twice a month with vegetables, egg shells, and coffee grounds.  You can buy it on amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/Norpro-Gallon-Ceramic-Compost-Keeper/dp/B000K76CPK

Next, we took old cardboard boxes (amazon prime!) and laid them over the top of the dirt.  Sounds strange, but the lady from MGNV said it adds organic matter and attracts earth worms.

The last thing was to plant winter wheat as a cover crop.  This site talks about the benefits of cover cropping your garden: http://www.gardening.cornell.edu/factsheets/ecogardening/impsoilcov.html

All this dirt farming isn't attractive.  Our yard looked something like this all winter:


One last thing - the Virginia Cooperative Extension office offers soil testing kits that test your soil's PH, nutrient levels, etc. The cost is only $10 for in-state residents and $16 for out of state.  We didn't get around to doing this, but plan to for next year.  http://www.soiltest.vt.edu/

Sunday, March 9, 2014

The yard

Here's what our yard looked like last June when we bought the house:


It looked pretty, but wasn't useful for much other than looking at. And breeding mosquitos. So we decided to rip most if it out.

 In the process of ripping out the plants and little fish pond, we found that the soil was full of little rocks and old broken glass.  The house was built in the 1890's, so at least one of the previous owners must not have been good at taking out the trash.

To clean up the soil, I bought a $5 turkey roasting tray at the grocery store, cut little holes into the bottom, and sifted through the most contaminated parts.  Probably not the most efficient way (took an afternoon), but at the end we had nice, glass-free soil.



After ripping out the landscaping and cleaning up the soil, we've done two major pieces of work: building a shed to keep our bikes in, and building raised garden beds.  Here's the end product (as of 2 weeks ago):


In the next few posts I'll get into more details about how we prepared our soil over the winter, and how we built the flower beds.






Saturday, March 8, 2014

Kickoff!

Hello! Welcome to the Postage stamp garden blog, where I will post the adventures of setting up a productive vegetable garden in the small backyard of our home in Old Town Alexandria.

 My wife and I moved to Alexandria in June 2013. We've always thought it would be fun to have a garden, but have spent the last few years bouncing between cities and apartments and never had a chance. Now that we've settled down a bit we've decided its the perfect time to take a stab at a vegetable garden.

 Our back yard is a postage stamp, hence the blog's name. Undaunted, we've annexed a large chunk of it for the garden. We think it's a challenge to see how much we can grow, and hope to make our little garden more and more productive over the years as we learn what the hell we're doing.

 This blog will act as a journal on our gardening adventures this year. Our original plan was to just keep notes on my computer, but we thought other people might be interested. We'd love to hear from you about what you like on the blog. We'd also love to get feedback from experienced gardeners on what we're inevitably screwing up. Hope you enjoy it!