Busy Livin: At Home!

Gardening: by Steph Davis

By KAVU

April 16^th, 2020

There’s a south facing square section of my yard, about 16 feet by 16 feet, and it used to be completely filled up by a big pine tree, which provided a lot of shade for the front of our house.

A few years ago, we came home from a trip to Index, and the tree was dead! This was a huge loss from a shade perspective..... but definitely opened up some new opportunities from a gardening perspective.

The thing is, gardening is very hard to do when you’re always going on trips and doing outdoor sports all the time.

So, I really wanted to turn that square into a garden, but it was on that "someday list".

Now that staying at home is what’s going on this spring, I knew it was the perfect opportunity to get that garden going, plus, having extra food around this season can only be a good thing!

I used my husband tool to pick-axe the compressed dirt in the garden, and then turned it all over with a shovel. I did a ph test and found out the dirt is a little alkaline, so I mixed in some sulfur. Then, I mixed in some compost that I had luckily started last fall….

.....just because compost is one of those things you should have on hand, even if you’re too busy to garden thoroughly.

Ian found one of the buried sprinkler lines with the pick axe, so we laid some new PVC pipe at the front of the garden and then I set out 7 irrigation lines, each with its own shut-off valve, for the 7 rows we dug in the garden.

Irrigation always takes FOREVER. I’m still working on getting the lines set up and just right, and probably will be all season.

Meanwhile, I had a few peat pots and lots of seltzer water cans in the recycling bin, so I punched holes in the bottoms and cut the tops off and found some other stuff in the recycling, and got some starts going.

At the moment, all the little starts are doing great! We eat tons of arugula and chard, so I started greens, as well as tomatoes, basil, cilantro, mint, cabbage and lots of hot peppers.

Usually in Moab if you get too excited about gardening and put anything outside in April, there’s always some totally unexpected freeze and all the little sprouts die. So it’s really good to hold yourself back until May.