Starting from Scratch
We planted our vegetable garden today! This is so exciting. A week or so ago we got our plot assignment from the housing manager and started to dig out the weeds. There was a lot of rain last weekend, and during the whole week, so it was kind of an on-again-off-again kind of thing until today. We got all the remaining weeds out (lots of grass) and turned all the soil. We blended in quite a lot of coffee grounds from Starbucks, leveled everything out, and planted our starts. We went to the Little Red Farm, where our friends the K’s have their wonderful nursery. We got a selection of tomatoes, basil, butternut squash, spinach, and swiss chard (see photo above.) Here’s what our patch looked like a week ago, and what it looks like now that we have our stuff planted:
We are planning to plant some seeds in the area shown in the upper left – probably beets and corn. There are faucets next to each patch, but they haven’t turned the water on yet. Hopefully they will soon because our apartment is not all that close!
The landscaping in our complex is all in bud and bloom – don’t these pink blossoms look good enough to eat? Some of them are starting to pop.
That sounds like a lot of fun! I want to have a vegetable and herbs garden too, but my backyard has a lot of “visitors” (wild rabbits and squirrels), and they will eat all of them. What is the purpose of using coffee grounds? Do you have to pay to get them from Starbucks?
Yeah… the animals are a problem! I am worried about slugs. And there are squirrels around, too, so hopefully they will leave our veggies alone. the coffee grounds are free – they usually have bin where they put bagged grounds but call before you go because they aren’t always available (not sure why, since that’s what Starbucks does is make coffee all day…) Coffee grounds add nitrogen to the soil.