Even more vegetable futures

Earlier this spring, we signed up for the Full Plate Collective, a CSA, alongside one of Judson's coworkers. So we have a 2/3 share of vegetable futures, theoretically enough to feed 2/3 of a family of four throughout the growing season (late May through late November). Since a family of four generally includes two children, who would a) not eat as much as adults anyway and b) be unimpressed with local vegetables, I assume a 2/3 share should come close to being way too many vegetables for the two of us.

So what did we do with this knowledge? We started our own garden! And it's not just a small herb garden, as I had originally envisioned. Nope, it's around 400 sq. ft.

Being the geeks we are, we did a lot of planning before we started doing real work. We perused the two gardening books we received as a gift from my in-laws (thanks, Marc and Audrey!), made a list, and then started figuring out when things would need to be planted. But this wasn't enough for me... I required spreadsheets.

So I made them.


It took us a while to get organized, but we finally broke ground (literally) last week. Judson rented a tiller, which he used to tear up our backyard while I was out for a 13-mile run. Then, the next day, we dug fence post holes. Last week, I built a gate door.


This weekend, we had all the really hard work to do, plus we absolutely had to get the very early stuff planted, since we're now about four weeks from Ithaca's last frost date. We dug trenches. We put up a fence. I hung the gate. We dug paths. We spread the most noxious smelling fertilizer I've ever encountered. We spread manure. We worked the fertilizer and manure into the soil. Finally, we planted seeds, watered the garden, and put down our floating row covers to protect them. Fortunately, in all our digging, we had found plenty of large rocks to act as anchors.


Soon, we'll have to string the barbed wire along the top and bottom of our fence to keep out the deer. We will also need to bury some fence under the gate to discourage the rabbits, or all our trench digging today and yesterday would be kind of pointless. And finally, we need to get some wood mulch for our pathways.


But nothing really needs to be done for the next two weeks, which is just fine with me. I'm supposed to be tapering for my half marathon on the 3rd.