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I’m so excited to be sharing with you today a little peek at our Back to Eden Garden.
This is our garden area. Yep, we are just using the space around our house. The flower beds where most people plant beautiful landscape, is where we plan to have nice juicy tomatoes.
We attempted to have a garden here last year after our move and did a few rows along the house. The combination of planting late (because of the move), bad soil and the losing battle with weeds resulted in a not so successful year.
This year we started planning months in advance. While we were planning we decided to try the Back to Eden, no- till, organic gardening method, which we are hoping will be the answer to our awful red clay and the countless weeds.
To create a Back to Eden Garden you need compost and lots of mulch! My husband spent one morning calling around with the hopes we could get what we needed for free. He called all the tree removal companies in the phone book and every town municipalities around us. Thankfully the city next to ours was giving away free leaf compost and mulch. I lost count after we hauled the 7th load, and what a blessing it was that it only cost us a little time and gas.
Before we laid down the compost we wanted to put down some newspaper as a barrier. My husband called the local paper to see if they gave away old newspapers, but that wasn’t a possibility. They did inform us that they had end rolls of paper that we could buy for $4, which worked out perfect. It was a great deal and one roll did the entire space.
This is how quickly the weather changes in NC, we went from working in shorts to the very next day needing hats and gloves. After the paper was laid out we laid down a layer of compost, followed by a thick layer of mulch.
With the Back to Eden method you lay the mulch very thick. It was a little bit of work, but if I don’t have to weed in the middle of July it’s totally worth it!
The reason for laying it so thick, is that it’s composting below, adding nutrients to the ground. The other bonus of laying it thick is, we won’t have to add more mulch for a very long time. Because the mulch was so high, we built a wood frame around our garden area to help contain it.
It looked so nice when we were done. I know vegetable gardening aesthetics aren’t everything, but when it’s this close to your house it’s so nice that it does looks good.
To plant our seeds we pushed back the layer of mulch and planted in the compost. As the plants grow we will pull the mulch in back around the plants little by little.
It isn’t warm enough to plant tomatoes yet, but my husband went ahead and built these awesome stake- a- cages with materials we had on hand.
We will also be planting small watermelons and cantaloupes on these trellises he built once the weather warms up a little more.
Hopefully this is just the first of many garden updates. I’m always so excited to share about our garden. I hope this years garden will prove that even if you don’t have great soil, time to weed or an abundance of space, you can still have a great garden.
Kathleen @ Fearlessly Creative Mammas
We’re working on a garden around here right now too. Well, I’m not, the rest of them are. I will send them this post for some ideas. Good luck! I hope it works well.
Jason
How is the garden doing? Thinking about prepping a plot for next year with this method – in Greenville, NC.
brenna
Since you are in NC than you know we haven’t had great weather. Cold and rainy when we were planting and hot and dry when we needed the water. So the weather has definitely affected how much our garden has produced as well as everyone else, BUT I haven’t had to pull any weeds or even water. To have a similar garden to everyone else with about 70% less work makes the Back to Eden garden a winner to me! I think if we had a traditional garden and I had to pull weeds and water every day in this heat I would have said gardening is not worth it, so I’m so glad we did it. I will be sharing a full update about our garden later this week hopefully. I really recommend it though and laying the mulch for next year should make your garden even better than ours, since it will have time to compost and ours didn’t.