Roof Garden Gal

Dirt. When you have a yard, you think you’re the queen of all dirt. Why on earth would you need MORE dirt when your empire is already full of it???

Well…as I found out removing grass from a 25 by 10 foot spot in my yard, when you dig up grass, it takes 3-5 inches of dirt with it.  And this is 100 square feet of dirt that you’ll need to replace so that you don’t have a giant unsightly hole in your lawn.

So…off to Lowes!

In case you were wondering, that’s what $200 worth of soil looks like from Lowes. It took me 2 trips in a Ford Escape to get this home, and A LOT of help from the staff at Lowes with loading it all into my car (seriously, the staff at my local Lowes are ridiculously helpful. I love it there).

I got 33 bags (33sq feet) of a good mulch-y top soil, and 12 large bags of vegetable-specific garden soil (30 sq feet). I supplemented all of this with 6-7 additional bags of topsoil and organic garden soil we had lying around the lawn from other projects.

If you’re doing the math, you’ll realize this means I only got around 70 square feet of soil.

But don’t despair! I have 6 cubic yards of mulch in my driveway thanks to the city of Alexandria! That’s wayyy more than I need for this project (in fact, way more than I need for anything…anyone want some mulch???).

This is my dirt, in my garden.

Side note: I had wanted to try organic garden soil, but it came down to a cost issue—it cost me $80 for 30 sq feet of high quality vegetable garden soil I purchased, but it would have cost meat least twice as much to get the same amount in organic soil. I am all about organic gardening, but for a project this size the start-up cost is enormous, and wasn’t possible within my budget.

Hi, I’m Erin (aka schmerin). And this is my first post about building my garden in Del Ray, Alexandria. This is cross posted from my blog, Garden and Gears.

In years past I’ve done windowsill gardening in Arlington–mostly herbs like basil, oregano, and some ill-fated pepper plants, and last year I used containers to garden on my fiancé’s townhome’s back porch.

So moving on to this year—WE RENTED A HOUSE WITH A YARD! Did I tell you? It HAS A YARD! That gets lots of sunlight! So this is my first post on how we built our garden.

Step 1 and 2 of building a garden: Finding and Digging out a Space.

Task 1: Find a location. Our backyard is a decent size, but has some weird bushes, a shed, and an odd cement path. All of which we’ve been informed by the landlord cannot be moved. So we looked around for a spot that had four qualities:

1. Wouldn’t be an eyesore for the neighbors.
2. Got plenty of sunlight during the day.
3. Large enough to be around 20 feet long and 5-10 feet wide.
4. Was easy to block the dog from getting into.

The spot that fit all of these qualifications ended up being on the west side of the lawn, behind the shed.

Task 2: Realize there is grass where the garden should be, but no grass in the center of the lawn (?!?!?). In case you were wondering, digging up and moving grass is really tough. Day 1 and about 6-8 hrs of work resulted in a 10×10 foot hole, and a nicely patched spot in the center of the yard.

Day 1 of digging

Task 3: Add fencing. This step I’d actually recommend doing after digging the hole since the fencing blocks the shovel from getting to the right angles, but my fiancé and neighbor went ahead and did it at this point anyways. The green fencing is from Lowes, and is attached to 8-10 green stakes. It looks nice, and isn’t an eyesore for the neighbors. The gate was not built yet at this point.  The total size of the fenced in space is 25 by 10 feet.

Chris and Dave building the fence

Task 4: Keep digging.

Still digging…

Task 5: FINISH DIGGING! Digging took 3 days of 6-8 hrs each, spread over 3-4 weeks. Digging up grass is really tough work, especially on 80 degree days with full sun, which seemed to be every weekend.

FINISHED DIGGING!

Next post…DIRT.

It’s official, people!

Tomatoes are here to stay!

Most importantly, I remember my Grandpa Ben growing tomatoes in 5 gallon buckets in our commercial building in NYC, using any available outside space with sun. I don’t remember if he was ever successful. (I’ll have to ask my father about that.) But, he kept trying. I think he’d be proud of me for this year’s garden. 

Here are my babies, nice and big, waiting to be transplanted. I can’t believe I was actually able to start tomatoes from seed. First time! I’m really happy.

I drilled holes in the bottom of each bucket for drainage. I think I wound up making 15 holes in each. Then I put a few inches of bits of styrofoam on the bottom, also to assist with drainage. Remember, we put a whole lot of styrofoam into the tanks early on. I was able to use up a lot of left over stuff I already had. It’s very difficult to find a styrofoam recycler, and I really didn’t want to just trash it.

Then I filled the buckets with a mix of organic potting mix, organic garden soil, and left over dried, spent beer grains from Farmer Russell. It helps with drainage, too. It looks like there’s a lot of grain in here, but I wound up adding a lot more soil mix.

In go the peat pots. Plants are buried up to their first set of real leaves. All of those fuzzies on the stem will turn into roots. I left enough space and there will be enough settlement in the buckets that I will be able to add at least another inch of potting soil in a few more weeks, covering more of each plant’s stem and encouraging more new root growth.

And we’re all in! I have six plants in total, but two of them are going to ShmErin later this week. Here are my four all finished, and then in their new corner. If this space doesn’t work out, it will be easy enough to move them. I will stake the plants in the next week or two. Not sure if I want to do three stakes or a cage for each one.

Also, side note. I was wearing shorts and a tshirt upstairs last night as I worked, as it was quite hot today. Totally got a bit of a skin reaction from the potting mixes. I forgot that that happens to me. Oops. Had to shower again before bed. Oops again.