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.

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.

Image by Aziez Ahmed via FlickrI love gardening tips. I guess it’s because I have so much to learn about gardening and being 55 I may have more years behind me than ahead of me.

I like gardening tips that make gardening easier as I find each year gets a little harder to get down on the ground and still get back up again.

Things like knee pads help my poor ole knees from feeling the pain of kneeling and there doesn’t seem to be so much pressure on my knees when I try to stand up again.

This year I am learning about using raised beds and big pots to plant in so that I don’t have to reach down so far and if I do it right I don’t have to kneel at all.

Having the right gardening tools for the task at hand can make a lot of difference. I used to get right now on the ground and dig and pull to get dandilions out of our lawn but now I have a tool I can use while standing up. I found out about it while I was on one of my daily walks around the neighbourhood.

It’s amazing what you can learn just walking around or as I have been doing for a while now, using gardening tips from Youtube.

Get your kids involved or grand kids for that matter. If you teach them to love gardening and make it exciting you might be amazed at how much they will do to help you and think it’s fun.

Backyard gardening tips I have learned from others have made gardening a hobby I can still enjoy even though I am not in very good shape or health at the moment.

There is so much great stuff on Youtube but recently I have been viewing gardening tips I can use in my backyard garden and Youtube doesn’t disappoint.

There is so much great content that I am going to start adding gardening videos from Youtube right here on my blog. I have also started a gardening channel on Youtube dealing with backyard gardening tips.

Because space is at such a premium for most people my first concern with gardening was how to get the most from the least amount of space and that is where square foot gardening or here in Canada square meter gardening.

We also needed to learn about composting for rich soil. Watch this composting video and you will see exactly what I mean.

Drop by my gardening section on Youtube and check out a few of the videos that have helped me be a better backyard gardener.