Got Dirt?

Boxes are built and we are ready for some dirt!

Big thank you goes out to our friend Phil Holcomb, of PH Construction, who surprised us with a truckload of superb fill-dirt for our veggie boxes. We live in a very suburban area so we opted to not place chicken wire at the bottom of our boxes to defer gophers and other rodents from burrowing in our planter boxes. If you live somewhere with an abundant amount of critters it’s a great idea to lay down some type of mesh prior to filling your boxes with dirt.

We filled each box with about 16 wheelbarrows fill-dirt. If you ever need a good arm workout, shoveling dirt and transporting it to another location is excellent! Once the dirt was settled in the boxes we made another trip to Lowe’s for some compost, manure and garden soil. After reading some various gardening books they all recommend to lay down compost prior to planting your veggies. For the lack of time and not having a compost bin (as of now I have started my own compost bin, but that’s for another post) we created our own concoction of compost.

For each box we mixed 5 bags of steer manure, 2 bags of premixed compost soil ad 2 bags of garden soil. Once all the bags were opened and spread throughout the veggie boxes we started churning and mixing all the elements together to create a soil that would be very nutritious for our veggies. For the next five days we would repeat the process of mixing the soil, as well as watering the soil to insure everything is properly blended and cooled down prior to planting.

Please note, this will be the last picture of Hank & Rally in our garden boxes :)