Our Unusual Gardening Tools

Once upon a time, Scotty and I put a garden in our backyard and adopted the Square Foot Gardening method. We gardened with both success and failure for a few years. It was great! Then I went back to school and got pregnant, and we took two summers off gardening, and the garden grew weeds that were 5' tall, and our chickens dug all the dirt out of our garden boxes, and our peach tree died, and the garden was never quite the same. 

We've been working on rehabilitating our garden for the past few summers, and this year we've made some really good progress. It's taken years, but we've sifted all the dirt out of the gravel, moved all the boxes, transferred the dirt, and moved all the rocks. We still have some work to do, but we got to the point where we've been able to plant! Sadly, we missed the first wave of planting and didn't get our cold weather crops in this year, but we're just in time for the warm weather crops!

We're trying corn for the first time (we've always been lucky to have farm corn. Uncle Fred still hooks us up each year, but it's time to become self-reliant in that area). I'm trying to plant it in phases so it ripens at different times. We planted some herbs, some tomatoes, some peppers, and several vining fruits and veggies. We used to have a decent strawberry bed... but chickens... so I got a bunch of strawberry starts from my neighbor which should fill in nicely over the next couple of seasons. It feels so nice to be gardening again. We've planted the last two or three summers, but our soil levels in our boxes were really low, and the dirt lacked nutrients, so our yield wasn't fantastic (but it got us through). This year, we have added fresh Mel's Mix to all our boxes and will hopefully have better luck. Unfortunately, it's only been three days since we started planting, and something has already munched on our plants, and we don't know what creature we're up against! Sneaky thing! Are you a bird? Are you a snail? Are you a rodent of unusual size?

Yesterday while I was working in the garden, I realized that we have some pretty funny gardening "tools."

Two of our most-used gardening "tools" are the arrow and the broom.

When we first started square foot gardening, I drove nails into the garden boxes at 1' intervals, and I would use them to run yarn across the boxes to make a 4' x 8' grid for planting. Then I got kind of annoyed with cleaning up the yarn every season, so I started just drawing the lines in the dirt instead. I really only need the grid just long enough to plant, so the yarn started to seem inconvenient and time consuming (though it looked pretty cool strung across the boxes). 

An old, broken arrow is a great drawing tool to make the grids. 

The arrow is also nice for poking holes in the dirt to put seeds in. 

Yesterday it took me a while to find the arrow, and I was quite distraught! Luckily I eventually located it leaning against the shed. 

Several years ago I ran over our broom and broke half the handle off. It's been floating around our garage ever since. The broom is awesome for smoothing out the dirt. As we've been shoveling fresh Mel's Mix into our boxes, we've needed to do some stirring, which creates hills and lumps. After we finish shoveling and stirring, we just take that handy broken broom and smooth everything out. 

Another handy "tool" we have in the garden is an old pond form. We use it to hold dirt - kind of like a wheelbarrow without wheels. We've also filled it up with weeds and garbage. 

The pond form doubles as a swimming pool for our kids. Win/Win!

Last but not least, we have a rabbit cage, which we use to sift rocks. 

Five years ago our friends moved to Minnesota, and they left their rabbits with us... which we kind of killed. Well, maybe not. They pulled a Romeo and Juliet on us and died together on a hot day. Now we use their cage to sift the dirt out of our gravel, and frankly, we can't live without it. 

I think I should start my own line of gardening tools. Watch out, Martha Stewart! 

I'm feeling so grateful for our little chunk of land - a yard where we can put forth an effort to grow some of our own food. It never feels like the most economical choice (we spend far more money on plants, seeds, water, and manure than we would for a summer's worth of produce from the market), but it's pretty satisfying to put something in the ground and watch it grow - then serve it for dinner and think, "With my arrow and my rabbit cage, I did this!"