Gardening and Making a Dirt Angel

We started a new project last week. After 2 years of gardening in my square foot gardens in my yard (I'm still doing them this year too) I branched out and signed up for a garden plot. There is a huge fenced in area here on post with 44 plots that are each 10 feet by 20 feet.

My reasons for doing this garden:
1. Grow the things that don't grow well in my backyard because they don't get enough sun there.
2. Give the kids a summer project. (I didn't share that with them. I told them we were practicing self-reliance, and being obedient, etc., etc. but really I want them to have something that they have to help with.)

Anyway, back to the events of the last week. When I went down earlier in the week, our area had not been rotatilled (sp?) yet and was 90 percent covered by weeds up to 2 feet tall. It looked like it probably wasn't going to get tilled which meant we were going to get to do lots of weeding. I was excitted. (Kind of sick but that means there would be lots of productive work for the kids to do.) When we showed up Friday night, the weeds were gone. Bummer!!! They rotatilled Friday morning.
Here is a picture of our plot as we found it when we arrived. We were hoping to get a true "Before" picture with all of the weeds but they were gone. The tilling job wasn't the greatest though so we got to spend an hour Friday and 2 hours Saturday morning digging out remnants of weeds and picking up/digging out lots of rock. B's favorite part... swinging the hoe.

What would have been the best picture from Saturday morning, I missed because my camera was in the van. We'd finished with the digging, leveling, and surface scraping to get the last of the weed remenants and small rocks on the surface. The plot looked pristine. We had 3 buckets full of small pieces of weed and small rocks with a bunch of dirt mixed in that we were carrying to a back corner of the garden area to dump. When the buckets were lifted up, you could see a ring in the dirt where they had been sitting. Ah Ha!!!! This was inspiration to P. I was in a far back corner of the garden area when I heard C yell, "Mom, P's trying to make a dirt angel." I looked and saw P, laying on the ground in the middle of our plot, moving her arms and legs back and forth. Then she stood up and looked to see if she could see her angel. I wished I would have had my camera. Oh well. Dirty, but clever, idea.

Saturday afternoon and Monday we returned to the plot to prepare our planting areas. (Dig down 6 inches, work in composte and create mounds.) I did most of this as B and C were making me nervous with the hoe and shovel and the small space. We went back again last night to make the area for our cucumbers and put up the support.

Here it is ready to be planted. The majority of those rocks we found while digging up the ground.
We'll be growing, peppers, carrots, zuchinni, summer squash, cantelope, cucumbers, and P is growing sunflowers. We'll be planting this weekend. (And we've got to plant our snap peas, beans, and radishes in our back yard still.) I can't wait. I love to dig in the dirt.