Recession Gardening in pictures

We're not calling this a Victory Garden, but instead a Recession Garden. This is our way of fighting the cost of foods in the grocery stores, and making sure we're eating local and organic. As you can see we're giving up lawn to add more gardening space. We have other beds on the sides of the house, too, but it's time to get serious about our endeavors.

Here are the square foot garden boxes my clever husband built two weeks ago. Hopefully you can see the boxes in the background are lined with several layers of newspaper, and then shredded leaves. Thankfully the night he added these layers we got eight inches of snow to wet them nicely.

Shadow is the "super" for any work we do in the backyard. Here she is trying out one of the boxes. She made sure she sat in each box while keeping an eye on the master.

This photo shows me raking more leaves. My husband mows over the leaves, bags them and dumps them into the compost bin, and a couple of holding bins we have just for leaves. Our compost bin is in the background. We sometime see deer helping themselves to goodies at the top of the bin.
Composting our leaves and our kitchen scraps is an added benefit to our garden, and it's very easy to do. It's our version of "Black Gold."

Here is my husband dumping a wheelbarrow of our compost onto a tarp. The bags you see are vermiculite and peat moss which he'll dump out also onto the tarp. We've been reading Square Foot Gardening and Lasagne Gardening and have learned a way to mix these three things all together.

We had to really put some muscle into dragging this mixture in the tarp to combine it, but it only took fifteen minutes of back and forth mixing.

We mixed the components by walking and dragging the tarp to combine everything together. We were surprised at how well this worked without any raking.Here we are dragging it back down the hill to mix again.

One more time up the hill.

See that nice rich soil. My husband added fifteen shovels full to the wheelbarrow and then it took two loads to fill the four by four foot boxes, and doubled that amount for the large boxes.
Here a pic of our cute photographer taking a break from laundry and homework to see what mom and dad are up to. Of course some lovin' time with Maggie, our thirteen year old lab is always in order.

Here's one of the boxes filled and waiting to by planted. We sprinkled them all down with the hose and then it began to rain. We're supposed to have a drizzly rain for the next two or three days so a weather-imposed break from the garden will give us time to get our seeds organized and ready for their new homes. MMMmmmmm...... I can just taste those home-grown tomatoes now.

Five years ago this Brandywine tomato from our garden won a blue ribbon at our county fair, and we'll be growing them again this year.

It weighed 2 lbs. 6 ounces!
Working in the garden on these cold March weekends will have it's rewards! Tell me about your Recession Garden plans and what you'll be growing.

Here's to vine ripe tomatoes and the Lord's favor upon our gardens~

Dana