I keep saying it but I just have to say it again. We are so proud of our first little backyard garden. We weren’t so sure we could do it back in the spring.

backyard-garden

We have been here for a few years so we already knew how poorly the soil drained where we were going to put the garden so I knew I needed to do some homework before I started digging.

I just love Youtube for stuff like this as I seem to learn a lot faster by example. It didn’t take long to find an answer but it did take me a whole lot longer applying what I learned.

Preparing My Garden Plot For Drainage

First, I started by measuring the 4 ft square that would soon become our garden and then removed the sod and about an inch of soil along with it.

I don’t have a lot of endurance due to health so it took me a couple of days to strip the sod until I was down to just hard clay.

I soaked the soil for a while to make it easier to dig up and then dug it to about a foot deep. I was done for the day after that.

The next day I added two bags of top soil and a half bag of peatmoss. I dug it into the clay and mixed it really well until it all looked the same. It was pretty cool to just reach down and pick up a handful of soil.

Then Came The Planting

We planted our little garden but soon found that 4 ft isn’t very big and I started the whole process again to add another 4 ft square, and then another until by the time I stopped I had a 4f t by 16 ft garden.

Then Came The Rain

It has rained about 3 times a week since I planted the garden and the drainage seems great but it really hadn’t been tested with too much rain at one time.

Then came Sunday night, well early Monday morning before day break.

A clap of thunder woke me and then I could hear the rain.

I got up and looked out the window. It was coming down straight and as hard as I had seen in while. But it didn’t stop, it just seemed to come down harder.

As it was getting light I could see from my bedroom window that yard was like a small pond with a little garden sticking out of it. It wasn’t looking good for our garden.

But I was about to be amazed.

I waited for the rain to stop and pulled on my boots to go out and take a closer look.

When I got out there the yard was pretty much floating and the garden had more than an inch of water in it but none of my veggies were destroyed by the rain.

An hour later I went back out and the garden was completely drained but the lawn was still holding almost as much as it was an hour earlier. I was super impressed with that I had done such a good job.

Next year I am double the size of our garden.

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Filed under: gardening • vegetable garden

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