Breaking Ground in the Garden at Aelfheim

Spring is looking up, I'm so excited, we finally broke ground on our first garden here at the home we call Aelfheim.  We had a corral in the front of the barn where the horses had been hanging out for years, it gets lots of sun and has had plenty of manure dropped all over the place. We decide it would make a perfect vegetable garden.  The horses left to go with the previous owner last fall, so it sat all winter.

It's also pretty cool because Dan and I like to use organic gardening methods and as far as anyone knows, this land has never been planted, so there should be just natural soil with no residual chemicals lurking.

We used to use a little hand tiller back at the old place, but Grandpa Gecko has a great garden tractor with tiller attachments.  When you're tilling up a 25' x 30' vegetable garden this is the only way to go!

Tilled it deep and the earth was actually fluffy!  Gecko ran the tiller and Dan, Mom, and I went behind gathering rocks as he tilled them up.

Dan got down and just smelled the soil, I have to admit, it really smelled amazing.

It was just beautiful! I'm sure not everyone falls in love with the earth, but we have.  When you grow your own food, you can't help but love the earth and it's potential for life. There were tons of earthworms too, always a good sign. One end of the garden is lovely, the other end is partially clay, but Dan and I have amended clay soil before, and much worse than this.  We have a big pile of oak leaf mold that we're putting on the clay end along with three stables full of perfectly seasoned manure the horses left as a going away present, we couldn't be happier about a pile of poo!

Speaking of piles, right now we aren't harvesting anything but rocks...lots of rocks.  See this big pile of rocks?  This isn't the only one this size that we pulled out of the new garden.  I'll use all the rocks we harvested to build a little wall around a new herb garden.

Soon, we'll till all the added material in, and then we'll be ready to start planting. We'll be starting our own seeds, and I just can't wait to see this beautiful earth bursting with life!