Garden is in …. finally

So I spent this past weekend shoveling 4 yards of topsoil in the garden. With all of this recent rain, our garden was pretty much under water. So I spent a ton of time shoveling dirt onto the area where the garden was last year to build it up and try to  keep the water at bay. Then to help with the garden flooding issue I decided we would go with raised beds. When all was finished, I had 6 4 foot by 4 foot boxes that sat on level ground and were filled with topsoil.

The area around the garden still looked like this though:

Yep, that’s standing water all through the backyard. But whatever, I wasn’t going to let a little skanky water keep me from having a garden. Capt. Insano and I went to Hornings Greenhouse on Saturday and I managed to get a crap ton of plants for cheap.

I have in that mess numerous varieties of peppers, eggplant, yellow squash, zucchini, cantaloupe, acorn squash, celery and something called “Ground Cherries”. I seriously have no idea what the hell they are, but they sounded interesting so I figured what the hell I’ll buy some and see what I get. Then there on the right in the white containers are 12 tomato plants that Capt. Insano grew and gave to me, oh and he also gave me some German Chamomile.

Then this is the stuff I had started, I bunch of peas and carrots.

So after dodging a few rainstorms, and getting some help from L Bird, A Bird, and the Capt. the garden got planted. A long the way, the chickens got let out to forage a little bit and everything sort of resembled Little House on The Prairie, except way cooler and way dirtier. The four of us were planting beds as the chickens wandered through the yard chasing bugs, eating weeds and occasionally needing to be tossed out of a garden bed.

When it was all said and done the beds were planted, the chickens were put away and this is what we ended up with.

I know, not bad right? It actually looks pretty good.

Oh, and I almost forgot, I’m also growing potatoes in buckets on the deck. It’s a really cool process  of letting the potatoes sprout then covering them with soil, until they sprout again and then covering them a final time so they can sprout one final time grow tons and tons of glorious potatoes.

But anyway, I just thought I would share. I have dirt under my nails and a feeling of satisfaction. It’s awesome. So what about you? Are your garden plans coming together? Best of luck…