The Garden

My awesome husband had this great idea to start a community garden here at our apartment complex. And since he works at the complex doing maintenance, he was in a position to talk to management about it which they readily agreed to. So Daniel got a skidster and ripped out a bunch of grass to start the garden in. There are 22 plots that are 10x10. The tenants love it!

So here is our garden so far. It was a lot of work to start out because the dirt here is full of clay. The complex could start a good business selling clay to art retailers. So we bought 12 bags of poop and Daniel tilled it into the dirt.

We planted :strawberries, tomatoes, peppers, spinach, onions, peas, sage, thyme, oregano, rosemary

We put down some fertilizer that made our spinach grow like a weed. This picture was taken after we harvested it, but it looked amazing.



In an effort to deter birds and rabbits from eating our plants, I put a few pin wheels in the garden to scare them off. I thought this would work, we used to tie reflective tags in our fruit trees and it did the trick.

Apparently killdeer birds are not frightened by the pin wheels. As you can see one has built its nest in my garden 6 inches from my strawberries. Every time I get a strawberry thats almost ripe, the mama bird eats it. She also wigs out every time we get near the garden, but what can you do?!

Our sugar snap peas are doing awesome too. The are a cooler weather crop and it's been pretty cold here, so they have done really well. I've seen a few pea pods already.

This is the bowl of spinach we harvested for ourselves. We gave another heaping bowlful to our neighbors. I knew we wouldn't be able to eat it all. Everyone thought the spinach wouldn't do very well because it's definately a cold weather crop, but like I said, it's been pretty cold here and we fertilized so it looks amazing. It's starting to warm up now, but Daniel thinks we'll still get one more good harvest out of it.

I'm so glad I'm married to a guy who knows what he's doing with plants. It would have been a huge waste of time and money if we didn't know what we were doing. He keeps pulling the flowers off the tomatoes and peppers, and I keep thinking we need to leave them on if we ever want any fruit. But, he knows best. He's been pulling them off so the plant will put more energy into getting stronger branches and leaf out more so it could support the fruit later on.