Oh, How My Garden Doth Grow!

Whenever I buy a plant, my husband likes to suggest that I just kill it in the store rather than taking it home and torturing it to death. Yeah, he gets a big kick outta himself. Well, point and laugh no more: I am a gardener! My seedlings are sprouting -- dare I say "thriving?" -- and I have pictorial proof:

Why am I gardening? I'm prepping for when the SHTF, of course!!! You know: TEOTWAKI? That and I bought an organic cauliflower the other day and it was FOUR DOLLARS. Four dollars for a CAULIFLOWER??? Sheesh, my world has already ended.

Later this summer, I'm building a green house so I can grow tilapia and get an aquaculture farm going. Actually, last week, we looked at a house for sale that had a pool. I'm dying to have a pool that I can make into an underground tilapia farm/greenhouse:

I could so totally get into this project.

So, while I'm getting the seedlings all ready, Hal went to work on the square-foot garden beds in the backyard. For the first one, he dug about a foot down and "tilled" the soil with the shovel.  Just doing this took him three hours. Sadly, I was very, very, extremely busy doing something really important or I would've helped.

Then he nailed together the 4'x 4' box, set it in place and filled it with soil, manure and sphagnum, getting it all mixed and spread out just so. It was beautiful! I wish I had taken a before picture because, well, it turns out, the girls sorta like square foot gardening, too:

Aren't they funny?

For the other two patches we needed to have tilled, we found a guy to do that for $30. "Worth every penny," said my Big Spender. Our new gardener is Mexican and we tormented him with our terrible Spanish. He stayed for like an hour extra hanging out with us. That was really fun!

Oh: if anyone wants to buy a crookneck squash in four weeks or so, give me a call. They'll be about $3 each. ♥