Homesteading - Preparing the ground

For those that don't know me (yet), I left the city and corporate life to try my hand at a holistic life out on a smallholding where I can grow my own veggies, collect my own water, and support myself and family off the land.
This is also supposed to change the lifestyle from one of crazy dog-eat-dog type life, to one that I can enjoy time with the kids and family, and still enjoy the simple things that actually mean a lot in life.

One of the first things I needed to do was to prepare the land we had purchased, to cater for vegetable or plant growth.

Below are a few pics of the changes that took place over a few months as we did just that.

We decided to plant cabbages initially, because we would always have a local market for them here in the Western Cape South Africa.
We also used large 'tarps' to kill all the weeds and to keep moisture in the soil, after we had fed and watered it for a week or 2.

Tell me what you think....

How the ground initially looked. We had our neighbors horses on the land to try help them get stronger (she did little for their wellbeing)

You can see on this picture, the the soil is dry, and not very good for any sort of plant growth.

And now for some of the changes

Installing watering systems was one of the most important things to do. But you also needed to feed the ground, and put down the right fertilizer that will also bind the very sandy soil.