Tilling the Garden

Saturday was beautiful... the perfect day to break up a new garden. We got out there by maybe ten or eleven in the morning. Dr. Lockwood brought his rototiller over and we got started. We started by removing most of the large rocks from the surface of the garden so we wouldn't be throwing rocks all over. You can see how our garden looked before we started work:

Rototilling is actually a lot of fun... it is fun to see all the weeds get chopped up and loose cool dirt get turned over and over. (As it turned out, our garden soil is actually very good for gardening; it is probably a bit on the clay-ish end of the spectrum, but a little clay helps to retain moisture.) When rototilling, you have to start the tilling shallow and slowly raise the depth stop for subsequent passes to till to the full depth of the rotors. In the end, the garden had to be tilled about five times to reach full depth. As you can imagine, it was quite the process. But then we had a lot of help;
Dr. Lockwood did some of the tilling...

and I did some...

and Leisel did some...

and Lynnae did some...

and even mom tried it!

Charae and dad also gave it a shot, but I didn't get pictures of it.

After Dr. Lockwood and I rototilled half of the garden, we turned the girls loose on the other half of the garden while we laid out the beds. We wanted to create raised beds in the garden so that the vegetables would have plenty of loose soil to root in. Raised beds also improve drainage in the soil. Laying the beds out is pretty simple: we cut 2.5' stakes from those 1"x2"x8' (87 cent) boards from Home Depot and staked them 3' apart for the beds and 1.5' for foot paths in between beds. Then we dug out the loose dirt from the foot paths and piled it on top of the beds. The following pictures show Austin helping to lay out and dig the beds, followed by a couple pictures of the finished beds:

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Here's a picture of my little buddy looking all chill on the steering wheel of his Deere; (Eat your hearts out girls!!!):

And, of course, a picture of my little girlfriend who carried around a bouquet of dandelions all day:

It was a great day and gave us a great head start on the garden... thank you, Dr. and Mrs. Lockwood!

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Next up... planting the berry patch!