The Garden Project: Chapter 1--The Planning

April 15th: I returned from Italy three weeks later wondering what had been done with the garden. A couple SFOC students had gathered to clear out leaves and plant some peas, since those have to go in the ground early on. But once I returned, we were all able to get together and form a plan of action as to what to do with our garden. It is a 1800 sq. foot area with 600 sq. feet of garden space. We inspected the construction of the raised beds with wooden boards. The boards were completely rotted away; so rotted away that all I had to do with kick one and it would fall away from the soil.

We knew we had to replace them. We then decided that maybe what we wanted to do with the garden was not so much focus on planting a ton of vegetables and turning into a vegetable producing machine. We wanted to make the garden look nice first (it is in shambles at this point in time). The ground had small pebbles on it with lots and lots of weeds growing in between the beds and it just looks neglected. Poor garden! We then found out there was a seedling rack where there should have been seedlings being prepared over the winter, but there weren't. We simply did not have enough time to invest in starting from seed (too much risk of improper germination), especially with our busy schedules and lack of people to take care of the seedlings.

We divided up tasks to beautify the garden. I was quite excited about making it look nice again, so I chose to look into stones for the ground and the landscaping aspect of it. Alexis would look into where we could get seedlings donated to us or where we could buy them, and Edward would look into wood to replace the beds (untreated of course). I also decided to learn about composting since we were told by Dick and Jane that there were composting bins...this becomes a chapter in itself.