Evolution of an Organic Garden

The question in your mind, right now, might along the lines of “What has a Playground and Organic Garden have to do with Grilling?”.

Absolutely everything!

I certainly love my local supermarkets and our summer farmers market, they all have great produce and a fairly strong line-up of organic produce, but the produce is rarely freshly picked. Unless I am at the farmers market, which is still several hours to a day or two fresh, it is most often not fresh but picked just before it's shipped, ripe or not. Being a natural born grazer, I just love to walk into a garden and pinch off a few bites of something growing, a garden is the perfect complement to any outdoor cooks arsenal. My previous attempts over the last 16 yrs or so at the house we live in now, have been mediocre at best. 100% due to three factors: location, location, location; we had a very small area, no water to directly access (we hand carried water buckets every day to water our vegetables) and limited sun exposure (many of the neighbors tress blocked the sun for much of the day).

Now all that has changed into a highly sun exposed, water accessible area of great proportions! Plenty of room to set up my little mini farm, minus the cows, pigs, sheep, goats, horses, etc., I think we can squeeze in some chickens though 🙂

Goodbye Playground!

To say that this playground was anything but huge, would be a gross understatement! It's footprint took up a 10′ x 20′ or 200 sq ft profile, that alone would make a fairly good size garden! Yes, it cost me a pretty penny at the time but we had 8yrs of great moments, laughing kids, and 1 broken arm to remember it all by.

All the things two young boys needed!

But it was time to pass it along to my niece and her new family. Couldn't be happier to share this with them!

Heck who knows … they might even let me come over and play on it once in awhile :-))))

Tearing it down!

Oh boy!

Lots of nuts and bolts, heavy lumber, plastic slide, shade canopy and spiders had to be handled and moved from the side yard (With no street access) across the back yard, up the front yard and onto a flat bed trailer.

Luckily we hand many hands to do the work!

How long did this take?

Glad you asked, about eight hours to be exact. Only because after the playground came down did we decide to give them the ton or so of rubber bark covering the yard. I originally thought of using it to line the walkway between my garden beds but as we talked and I shared the broken arm story, we all agreed that a few more hours of hard labor could spare her babies some painful experiences.

So they transported the playground and came back with shovels and wheelbarrows for us to scoop and haul (many times) a ton of rubber bark!

My New Organic Garden

This brings us to this …

Well, more like a huge 20′ x 35′ x 10′ space of very hard packed dirt …

Lots of space, sun, and water for me to use! Still a lot of work to do, cleaning up the ground cloth, raking out some of the remaining debris and finding the water lines I buried 8 yrs ago.

I plan to start with much of the basics:

• Chicken coop
• Raised bed planters
• Compost pile
• Rain water barrel

What am I missing that has worked for you?

Does anyone have a really good chicken coop design that would fit into a 6′ x 10′ space?

Best chickens to get for egg laying?

Compost bin design – probably a three stage?

That's it for now!

I'll keep you posted on the progress of my new organic garden and soon I will be sharing a ton of great straight from the garden recipes!