Last week, in my post about house renovations, I touched on the fact that our house was fairly neglected before we moved into it. This neglect included the outdoor space and the “garden” (if that’s even what you would call it.)

This spring my partner, Sammy, and I took on the task of cleaning up our yard and trying to make a practical garden space that could produce a grand harvest if we did it correctly.

Like most things in our lives, we underestimated the time commitment the garden renovation would take and then hyper fixated on it until it was complete…you know, like normal, well-adjusted people. However, we had no idea what was in store with this garden journey.

years of neglect

Our property has changed hands only a handful of times before we bought it, but we are convinced that the land itself hasn’t been taken care of at all.

There is an endless amount of rotting biologic material. And and ungodly amount of trash scattered throughout the property. You take a walk in the woods and there are broken plant potters, old hoses, buried mason jars, etc.

I wouldn’t say the property is covered in trash, but there is a lot of trash scattered throughout the property. We are slowly picking it all up, but there have been bigger priorities in living here so the trash disposal is a work in progress.

The trash pick-up started in earnest last year when we found some bags of trash buried under the ground, where we planted our apple trees. We dug out all the bags we saw and assumed that was the end of it. That was until this year, when we started digging the dirt up for our garden.

The Garden drama

To start our garden journey this year, we had to start by removing the railroad tie garden beds that were here when we moved in. I used these our first year here, but the soil was completely desolate of nutrients and turns out railroad ties aren’t good for gardens. Lucky for our health, my garden did horribly. Lack of nutrients, lack of pollinators, and lack of time to care about it.

After a lot of work we were able to separate the railroad ties, remove all the dirt that could have had leeched creosote in it, and we were ready to start the garden (approximately 2 weeks of work went into clearing the old garden beds.)

The plan was to dig into the slight hill next to our house to have a flat surface for the garden. However, once we started digging, we found SO MUCH TRASH. We didn’t even need to dig far to find it beneath the old garden beds.

They had to have been burying their trash for years. We dug out as much as we could and took it to the dump. We found a full oven range! This was such a discouraging and gross part of homeownership we did not expect.

We finally got to a point where we could see there was more trash, but we dug pretty deep in and it appeared to just keep going. We decided after another 2 weeks of clearing trash, to just cover up the remaining trash and continue building the garden.

End result

We decided to use the method of gardening called “lasagna gardening” in order to save money on trying to build the nutrients back into our soil. We did a layer of cardboard, then a thick layer of our unfinished compost pile, then a thick layer of the 50/50 loam compost top soil. This isn’t exactly what most lasagna gardens look like, but that’s the beauty of Shits Not That Difficult! We try to keep it simple and use what works for us.

The hard work of removing the literal trash in the ground and replacing it with fertile healthy soil to grow life sustaining food from is honestly a pretty beautiful thing to experience in todays world.

It was a lot of work – but our whole house has been! And now we can say we did a small amount each day to make this earth a more clean and better place and that is worth all the work in the world.

Most important, is a big shoutout to my partner, Sammy. I had a very difficult fall/winter/spring months dealing with a very traumatic and difficult family matter and he was there for me through it all. He is the reason so much hard work went into completing the garden. He knew how much it would mean to me to be able to garden.

Vulnerable, empathetic, and loving men are something the world needs more of. I am very lucky to have found one.

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