I think it's a garden!

Remember this tangle of weeds?

After a lot of hard (but fun) work and some team effort, that now looks like this!

We cleared our garden plot of all the weeds, tilled the soil, built gardening boxes, and planted away!

We're trying out the square-foot gardening method. The most important part is the soil mix: compost, peat moss, and vermiculite. What's great about it is that you only have to make that mix once, then just add a little more compost at the beginning of each growing season. No fertilizer, next to no weeds. The best part is that San Diego's landfill has a facility that makes compost, and residents can haul away loads for free. It's good, stink-free compost. Plants love it. 

Here is Jordan screwing one box together. I bought and moved the lumber, he manned the drill. Good teamwork, I say!

Even Kimball helped nail on the grids.

Since we left for Utah shortly after building our boxes, we covered one for the summer. In the other, we planted tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, beans, and radishes. We filled the rest of the squares with flowers. Kimball and I are in Utah for the summer, and Jordan won't be able to eat too much produce by himself, so that's all we did for this summer. Come fall, I'll probably be able to plant some more warm-weather crops, thanks to San Diego's Indian summer. Then will come cool-weather crops until next spring. The great thing about San Diego is you can grow food all year long!

The crops at the top of the box can all grow vertically, so we placed trellises along that side of the box for them to climb.

Tomatoes. Sweet 100 and Better Boy.

Bell peppers. Red and yellow.

Along the north side of the garden is the "squash bed". I added some peat moss alternative and some compost to this section of the garden, and bordered it with the bricks that we found buried beneath all the weeds and packed dirt that we cleared.

Imagine these squashes peeking out of the soil. They can grab onto the wire fence when their tendrils get long enough. I'm crossing my fingers they do well!

Our garden plot wasn't completely barren to begin with. We found this huge rosemary plant smack-dab in the middle of the plot, and there it stayed.

When we got the plot, the weeds were so thick that I couldn't tell if this little lemon tree was inside or outside the fence. Lucky us, it's inside!

Not quite ripe. Kimball loves checking for ripe lemons.

Jordan found this cute little tree in an abandoned lot. He transplanted it, and now it is "Kimball's Tree". It has these little orange fruits. I don't know if they are tangerines, mandarines, clementines....There haven't been enough ripe fruits to tell yet. But it is a cute little tree.

Even a few raspberries have made an appearance along the borders of the garden.

All in all, we're pretty tickled to have our little piece of land. These pictures were actually taken a month ago. Some good friends and neighboring gardeners (and hopefully some good rain!) have been looking after the garden the last few weeks. Jordan heads back to San Diego this week, so he will take some pictures and send me a report. I miss this little garden! There is something about working outside, pulling my fingers through the dirt, and checking in on each plant every day that is good for my soul.

And when you've had a long day of birdwatching with your "noc-lars," it's a pretty sweet place to chill, too.