From Yard to Garden

We dug up the yard today to put in our organic urban vegetable garden, and it's unnerving. And great. We've had small organic vegetable gardens in past years, but this year, we're going all in. Basically taking out huge chunks of our lawn to grow veggies in the city Lawns aren't big here in the heart of Denver. But we've just added at least 200 square feet to our garden by digging up the grass.

This is the backyard. (We dug up the front yard a couple of weeks ago, and pictures of that will follow.) Today we (and when I say "we" I mean my husband, Brad) put in a wall to make a raised garden so that we can really make this soil good, and plant square-foot garden style. Denver soil is full of clay, and kinda bad here in the city. We'll dig up the grass next ("we" here is all of us, and definitely my husband Brad), use a little of the soil under it, but add lots of peat, vermiculite, a little bit of better soil, and some compost.

Here's the deal. We're doing a massive change in our eating habits. My family has a history of chronic inflammation, and the stuff that goes with that: stroke, diabetes, alzheimer's, allergies, heart disease - and on and on. We want to fight back, and diet is critical. My adult son has made a high stakes bet with me that I can't change my diet radically. Leave processed foods behind, abandon sugar, white flour, white rice . . . the whites in general -- and start to eat plants again. I believe that at this point in our history, we're inundated with foods thick with chemicals and stripped of value, and we're swamped with advertising that convinces us this is normal. Commercials with all these happy, healthy looking actors eating really weird non-food stuff that we call food. It feels like it takes a full-on war to resist these "hey, this is normal, so buy this" forces.

So this is our crack at a "victory garden" circa World War II. We're going to give this a shot - all in -- and record our efforts, failures, victories, discoveries in this blog. We'll tell you what works, what doesn't. What grows, and how we've decided to cook it or otherwise keep it. Listen, I'm basically a potato chip eating, cookie lovin' gal who is converting to health before it's too late. So this is a massive experiment.

Here are the players, all of us living in this old Victorian house in short-season (gardening wise) Denver: Me and Brad, my hubby. My son Gavin. And my niece Jess who is the spectacular photographer recording our endeavor.

Today's high points:

1) We planted a Red Siberian tomato plant in the cold frame - which really acts like a kind of greenhouse -- that my husband put together for the first time this year. (more on that in another post). WE WILL HAVE EARLY TOMATOES! WE WILL HAVE LATE TOMATOES! This must be, and it will be, or there will be deep disappointment.

2) We dug up a bone today, and we think it's human. This part of Denver is built on a huge former graveyard. Second bone we've found - the first was bigger, and no, we don't have pictures. Here's the vid.

3) And we've dug up the only part of the back yard that might -- I say might -- have enough sun to make us some veggies.

4) And we finished the evening with a nice French Rose wine that matched that Denver sunset. Aaaaahhh.