4/14/12
Amber and I borrowed Doug’s van today to go to Home Depot and get gardening supplies.  We got 7 pieces of wood to make 3 garden beds, and had the store lumber staff cut the pieces.  We got four 2x8x12’s, two 2x8x14’s and a 4x4.  We also got 3” screws and brushes for oiling the untreated wood. Home Depot didn’t have linseed oil though, unfortunately.  Dominique from Leave It Better gave us some gardening tips from her classes at NYBG, which included information about how to build a raised bed and where to go for the supplies.  Neither Home Depot nor the Urban Garden Center in Harlem had the linseed oil, though, so I went to Ace Hardware.  We didn’t wind up getting soil as the soil in Home Depot was too expensive and of limited selection. 

It was incredibly fun building the garden beds.  With gorgeous weather and peaceful music, Juan Carlos, Ryan, Amber, Fabiola and I all pitched in to clear a patch of the back that was littered with rocks and garbage, build 2 out of 3 garden beds, and coat the untreated wood with linseed oil.  We also enjoyed a lunch of grilled vegetable sandwiches, fruit, and chips & salsa. Perhaps our landlord Kenneth will take the bad fence down soon and put up a new fence that we can somehow fix to be able to use to screen films. 



  

5/26/12

It took awhile for our house to finally get soil for the raised beds.  Luckily, this morning Juan Carlos offered to take Amber and me to the Urban Garden Center on 116th St & Park Ave.  The center is incredible – they have everything from plants to soil to lawn furniture to a composting section.  We were hoping to get around 25-30 bags of soil for the three garden beds, but that soil is heavy!  It’s good soil though – rich, fresh compost right from Long Island. 


 
 
We placed about half of the bags in Juan Carlos’ car;  Amber went back to the house with JC to drop off the soil while I stayed back as there was no room in the car. David, an employee at the Garden Center, showed me around.  There is a little seating area behind the Greenhouse where they have events like music nights that are open to the community. 



 There is also a compost section, where people drop off their food scraps in plastic bags, which eventually get added in to rotating compost bins. They even have a chicken coop and use the droppings to add to the compost.  They sometimes give the compost away to people who ask for it, and give away the chicken eggs too – which seems like a pretty cool system.  

Two car trips and 25 40-pound bags of soil later, we had enough soil to fill 1½ garden beds.  Since a lot of weeds tend to grow in the soil currently in the backyard, we decided to lay down newspaper on top of the weedy soil before putting down the fresh compost. We laid down the newspaper, placed the bags of soil on top, and then sliced the bags open with a knife to dump out the soil on top of the newspaper.  We filled the biggest garden bed (4x10) about 6” deep with 19 bags of soil, and placed the remaining six bags in the second bed – although a lot more are still needed!  Hopefully we can borrow Doug’s van sometime soon. 


 
 


5/27/12 Today I met Hector, a long-time friend of Reynaldo, who is a farmer in New Paltz.  Hector had brought a bunch of vegetable plants for someone at the farmer’s market the day before, but they didn’t wind up showing up so he gave them to us to plant in our garden.  This worked out perfectly as it’s almost June and we haven’t yet planted seeds and the seeds that Amber did try to get started didn’t actually come to fruition.   With Hector’s guidance about how much space to leave between plants, in our first bed we planted cucumber, basil, broccoli, lettuce, onion, and squash.  

 
 Once we get more soil we can plant in our second bed.  We can’t build/start our third bed until we weed the back again and move the rose bushes in the back of the yard. 

6/7/12
Today Jose, a friend of the house and active member of Friends of Brook Park, came by to help Amber and me clean up the backyard and finish the third garden bed. We weeded (what had basically become a jungle of gigantic stalks), transplanted a couple of rose bushes, leveled the soil, and constructed the third garden bed!  We found quite a bit of trash and bricks buried in the soil.  It's interesting to think about the history of the house and the backyard, and fulfilling to clean it up.  A work in progress!