Garden Variety Prepping

Joe going over the plot with a Roto-tiller

   A large portion of prepping is the accumulation and storage of food. Wrapped in to this is the production and processing of raw ingredients, aside from foraging, the most basic form of this is gardening and preserving. Since spring has sprung it's time to get the garden plot ready for the growing season.
   The last few years my family and I have kept a small backyard garden, this year will be different. Bigger. Better. Some like minded friends have gotten together and found a nice little area that we'll be working. After a few months of searching and viewing different properties we finally found one that met our criteria, all thanks to Joe at Dartmouth City Farms.
   The garden will be the subject of more in-depth posts over the following months but this post will be more about the planning and preparation. The garden we're working on is a 24 foot by 18 foot plot, larger than my normal garden of about six feet by twelve feet, but much smaller than my parents garden which takes up most of their huge back yard, this should be a fun project to tackle this summer.

Jessica and Joe smoothing out the surface after tilling

    Since there are several people involved in this project we will all be using the large garden for the plants we are all interested in growing, and still maintaining small gardens for "specialty" plants that each party would like to grow independently.
   Now that we have a bit of background on the project let's talk about what we've done so far to get the plot ready for the season. Before we even found a piece of land to work we decided that we wanted a garden with dimensions in the ballpark of 30'x20'. We weighed in pretty close with this plot. After considering plots that ranged from deer territory to pasture land an hour outside of the city, we did some soil tests on a yard a stone's throw from one of our houses and they came back with great results.

   Now that we had a location close to home, and not in deer country, we measured out a rough plot. This worked surprisingly well since our dimensions fell within the range of a garden that had previously sat there. So after everyone had inspected the site and had discussed the plan with Joe, we set a date to break ground.

   The plot had sat for a while since the last garden had been there so we went to work with shovels and rakes. After only a few hours of work we turned over a 26'x20' patch of earth. Save for a rock pile we knew existed in the middle of the garden, rocks were not an issue. Seeing the turned earth made me nervous the plot wouldn't be large enough for our plans, but we carried on.
  

 The next step was to run a Roto-tiller over the ground to loosen the dirt and breakup the root systems of the grass and few remaining weeds. I'd say the engine hadn't been run all winter (why would it?) since it took a bit for us to get it started. But once we got it going we made quick work of the tilling. This was my first experience using a gas-powered tiller, I really hope it's not my last. I fell in love with this piece of equipment. We tore through the plot in no time, and seeing the garden all tilled up made me a lot more at ease with the size of it.

All tilled and ready to tarp

   The final step we could take for the time being was to cover the top of the garden with tarps to "smother" the grass and whatnot. By both blocking the sun and warming the ground we should be able to kill the majority of the plant matter that's currently there while simultaneously composting it into our soil. While we wait for the end date of the frost we will accumulate the materials we need to incorporate into the garden. Seaweed, bonemeal, and fertalizer. In a week or so we will un-tarp the plot, even out the earth, spread our nutrients, then re-tarp the garden. After letting it sit for a bit we're going to mix the top layer of nutrients throughout the soil by giving it a second tilling, then all we have to do is wait for the frost to pass.

   This may sound like there is a lot of idle time, but there is not. While we wait for everything to "cook" we will be planning out what's going where. By drawing up a plot on grid paper, and playing the garden planning equivalent to Tetris (Which you will get to see at a later date), we will have an almost precise plan of where all of our plants will go. This, of course, is in addition to the gathering of nutrients, and any construction we may need to do for boxing or sheltering.

Took us three large tarps to cover the whole garden

   As you can see, if you've never done any gardening before, growing your own food isn't as easy as just tossing some seeds into the ground. Gardening in and of itself is what prepping is all about at heart. Careful planning, constant nurturing, hard work, and eventually reaping what you sow (quite literally and figuratively). As we progress through this project I will do more posts on each step of the process, so stay tuned. I hope everyone has enjoyed this project so far. As always: Be Prepared. Be Safe. Have Fun.