We have a garden!

We are going to have a big garden, no we are going to have a huge garden.  I've been reading and reading, and I'm determined to do it right this year.  I also have a wonderful friend who happens to be an excellent gardener who is the answerer of all my dumb questions.  I haven't killed my seedlings yet.  That's a start, right?  They are looking pretty good.

I've got great seeds from Baker's Creek and plenty of land.  I paid someone to come over and till the land.  I debated on how big I wanted it to be and finally decided on around 35' X 50'.  I have no idea if I'll be able to manage all that or not.  We shall see, I guess.

Here is the before picture:

Missouri is notorious for it's rocky soil, so I picked a spot that looked like it may have been farmed before.  I didn't see any rocks on the surface and hoped that maybe there wouldn't be too many rocks under the soil.  I was wrong!

We told the kids we'd pay them a penny per rock they pulled out of the tilled soil.

This is their pile of rocks after one day!  They are averaging about $5 an hour. 

We've been working on building a fence around the plot to keep the chickens from destroying our hard work.  I don't want to share the fruits of my labor unless I choose to.

Our fence building experience consists of, well we have no fence building experience.  We are totally winging it.  I figure we have to jump right in, and if we do it wrong we'll learn from our mistakes. 

I told my son that using the T-post driver would make his muscles bigger and help him bat harder.  See, my boy's passion is baseball.  It worked.

He worked so hard, he was sweating.  And it wasn't even hot outside.  I love having big, strong kids.

This lucky guy just gets to lay in the sun and watch us working.

We got a few of the posts in, then decided to wait for daddy's bigger muscles to help on the weekend with the rest.  In the meantime, we started weeding.  I had no idea how hard that was going to be.  It really is back breaking work.  I am loving my new little garden cart ($17 at Sam's club).

We worked hard,

but we also took lots of breaks.

 Here's the almost finished fence, after we got some help from Daddy:

I even got a little lettuce and spinach planted.

 We found an old wooden gate on the property and cut it to make a smaller gate for the garden.  We haven't hung the gate yet, but so far the chickens haven't yet tried to breach the fence.  Hopefully, they will not get too curious about what is happening on the other side of the fence.