In September, 2012 I started a garden. It sounds pretty simple but it wasn't. My first attempt, I used my shovel to turn over the dirt where I planned to have my garden. Since there was a smaller garden there, I tried to mix up the dirt and the soil. I then leveled off the surface, planted my seeds and my sweet potato tubers, and watered the ground. I watered the garden everyday. I kept the ground wet to help the germination of the seeds.
I soon found out that starting a garden was going to be more difficult
than I had hoped. Most of the seeds I planted did not sprout. My sweet
potatoes however, they sprouted but did not grow very big. At this I
realized I needed to start over. I needed to dig deeper and change my soil.
Arizona soil is very high in alkaline. Most of the plants that I planned
to grow needed acidic soil.
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| Part of the garden before I dug everything up. On the left is the only sweet potato plant that grew. |
I knew that I had to dig up more than just a few inches to have the kind of garden I wanted. When we first started planning this, I wanted to dig two or more feet in the ground.
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| Just starting to dig up the garden. |
Once we started to dig we found our first challenge. Arizona dirt is part clay and packs very firmly. Just digging up what you can see in the picture took awhile. It was like trying to dig up concrete. When we finally dug up a few more inches we found our second problem. Palm tree roots. Don't worry we didn't pull up a whole palm tree. We did however, trim the roots back.
Both problems were not easily solved and were dealt with the whole time we were digging. Of course I didn't do all of this my self, hence my use of, "we". I have some great friends. I know, not a lot of people would actually help someone dig a big hole in the ground. I was lucky to have a few guy friends of mine to help with the heavy duty digging.
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| Three of my greats friends working hard. |
After we had dug a good four to six inches down, we realized that we really needed to make the dirt softer. Shoveling muddy Arizona dirt was easier to dig up than dry Arizona dirt.
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| Two days after we filled the hole with water. |
We filled the hole all the way up. We filled it up in the evening, came back in the morning and found that there was still a good amount of water. If you notice in the picture above, the sweet potato is still there. At first, we wanted to leave it there and just let it grow. I thought about it for awhile and I realized that it would be logical to dig up the sweet potato plant. I wanted all of the dirt in the garden to be the same and keeping the plant didn't make sense.
The ground was finally ready to dig up. The mud was a lot easier but it still had that clay consistency. We had to shovel the dirt at a 45 degree angle to be able to really get a good shovel full.
There is a lot more that we did but I'll end this here before this first post gets any longer. I will post again later to continue my garden "story".
