Turning a Mud Pit into a Garden: Part I

When Bryce and I first glimpsed our house, its tiny backyard was a jungle of Southern-grown weeds.  Fortunately, its seller mowed that down before we moved in, leaving us with a similarly unattractive but less inconvenient plot of dirt.  We took a hands off approach to the yard during the winter and resolved to put it to good use, or at least make it less of an eyesore, come spring.

A badly photographed glimpse into the yard

So now that spring – or is it summer? We’ve got temps in the high 80’s today – is here, we’ve finally given our attention to making a garden from our pit o’ mud and weeds.  I spent a few days slowly turning over the earth with a little trowel, only to be rescued by Bryce, who sauntered in with the big shovel and finished the job in under an hour. D’oh!

While Bryce churned up the ground, I busied myself with a few other tasks.  First, I emptied the pots from last year’s balcony garden.  The parsley and sage from that batch appeared to be attempting a comeback, but they were tough, discolored, and not really worth saving.

The large black box is our worm composting house.

Then, I tackled the first plantings for our new herb garden.  I started with pots, seeds, and compacted soil that my sister-in-law Aubrey gave me back in December.  It’d all been sitting on our porch ever since, just waiting – like me – for warmer days.

The setup

I’ve never grown a thing from seed (wait, there are a few pregnancy jokes here, no?), but planting the chives, basil, and parsley was a pretty straightforward process.  After I loosened the soil disks in water, I filled each pot and pushed in a dozen seeds with the eraser of a pencil.  Then, I got to play chalk-artist:

It’s kind of amazing how much work goes into transforming a yard, even a small one like ours.  A 4′x18′ plot separated by a sidewalk from a 10′x18′ plot isn’t much, but for a busy medical student and a physically restricted pregnant woman, it is a slow-moving project.  Our work on it comes in fits and starts, so my updates will, too!  Next time, I’ll tell you more about our herb garden and the signs of life in those pots.