This is the year, folks. The year of getting serious about growing food and cutting back on the grocery bill!

Feeding a family is expensive. Especially if you try to buy the more expensive, HEALTHY foods.

Even the so-called healthy foods pale in comparison to home grown foods, when you are considering nutritional value and taste! We have been casually growing our own foods for a couple years now. We've got goat milk and chicken eggs and meat. We haven't been super successful, however, when it comes to fruits and veggies, simply because it takes TIME and ENERGY to maintain the plants! Plants don't baaaaaa or cluck when they are hungry, and are much easier to ignore. It was not a high enough priority apparently, but this year, all that is changing. Food IS THE PRIORITY!

Here it is, guys! The first step toward our goal: A raised bed!

We have a greenhouse. I may have mentioned this before.

As it turns out, it is entirely too hot here in Georgia to use a greenhouse most of the year. A winter greenhouse may be helpful, but, spring through fall, it is much too hot in there to grow much of anything. Plants end up baked. All is not lost though, we can transform this greenhouse into something much more useful: a shade house! This spring, we are planning on purchasing a butt-load of shade-cloth, and fixing this beast into a food-machine!

While I can't work on that quite yet, I CAN do something useful!

We have a pile of cement blocks lying around. They used to be a compost pile of sorts, but the design was flawed, and that is also being revamped. These cement blocks make an excellent frame for a raised bed though!

First of all, the kiddos and I put cardboard down, (big pieces, leftover boxes that held siding), to smother the weeds growing rampant. Then we carried the blocks and stacked them together to make a wall!

As you can see, we staggered them in order to make it a little more stable.

After satisfactorily building up our wall, we broke up and added old, dry branches to the bed. These will break down over time and provide nutrients later on, as well as provide a way to help hold moisture in the soil now.

We also dumped in some pepper plants+soil that were dying from the chilly weather anyway.

After this, we used our poor, tired arm muscles to shovel up chicken poop and add a layer of this. (Those cinderblocks were HEAVY!)

Now, chicken poo is too 'hot' to use right away for most plants, but we used it as the bottom layer, allowing it to compost while the plants are small and using the top layers of soil anyway. We tramped and stamped to make sure it worked its way down amongst the branches and such. We do not want air pockets hiding down there.

After dumping in all that manure, we hosed it down slightly, to reduce dust and add moisture. No one wants to breathe atomized chicken crap! Then we put a layer of lime on top, to sweeten up the manure.

Now time for the good stuff! Did you know goat manure is ready to use as-is? It, like rabbit poo, is not a 'hot' manure, and the plants LOVE it! We added a layer of partially composed goat bedding to the raised bed next.

The last layer of dirt to be added was a couple of large bags of clearanced potting mix we found at walmart!

I had a few kale plants growing in buckets, so I promptly replanted them into the bed. They look happy there.

We also planted some onion sets and garlic cloves. Those are buried, so they dont look like anything now, but I'm sure they will be up soon!

This is sort of a test-run. This bed will be planted with winter veggies, and the kids and I will work out the kinks and get a system into place. In the spring, I expect the composted items will have compacted some, lowering the soil level. We will add more compost to bring up the level and add nutrients, and plant some summer veggies in there. We will also begin constructing several more raised beds. (The natural soil here is terrible, so this makes the most sense.) We are also putting a plan and schedule into place to take better care of our tiny fruit trees that are barely surviving due to neglect. The children will be much more involved and have more responsibility with this, which is great, because: (A) They get to learn to grow food! and (B) We can accomplish much more TOGETHER than if I were to continue trying to do this on my own.

Thanks for stopping by to check out our new garden beginnings! I will be updating with our progress as time goes by!

I can't wait to eat more of our OWN veggies and cut back on that darn grocery bill!!!

 
What do YOU all have growing in your gardens now?!

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