Breaking Ground

What We've Been Up To
For all of our friends who might be wondering where we went, we've been busy. Intensely, physically busy (finally!) getting our garden started. One of the major reasons we moved to Newburyport—and in particular to this house with a half acre of sunny, flat yard—was to expand our vegetable garden. Our goal is to feed ourselves throughout the whole year by growing our own produce and (eventually) raising our own eggs and maybe keeping bees for honey.

Although we considered it (briefly), we don't live on a farm, so the garden design needs to be part of a suburban backyard where kids can play and we can have friends over for cookouts and birthday parties (like normal people). We were inspired by the idea of intensive gardening in French potagers (kitchen gardens) that make use of every inch of ground, and are located directly by the kitchen rather than being hidden in the "way back" of the yard. They are often decorative, and that's what we decided to go for.

Yankee Thrift Meets Southern Charm
Another inspiration was a trip last April to North Carolina, where we visited Old Salem. (Kirk worked here when I was in my last year at Wake, btw. I will find and post a photo of him on 1700s garb when I get the chance.) There are really lovely colonial-era gardens here, and they are full of food in addition to decorative things. One of the things we really loved was all that Carolina brick in the garden paths.

And a good thing, too, because brick is the one thing we had at our house. There was a GIANT patio behind the house, bordered by pressure-treated timbers that were above grade (and therefore often tripped on). So, like any good and thrifty New Englander, we decided to use what we had for material and remake the back yard. This is what we did:

See those pallets full of bricks? We picked up every goddamn brick, one by one, off of the sand pit you see here and set them out on those pallets to reuse them after the demolition of the backyard. I should also mention that it was cold and damp every day that we worked on this. This was really difficult work: sore hand muscles, hamstrings, and backs. And boy, was it slow going.

Here is the light at the end of the tunnel. You can also see that the only thing being successfully farmed so far this season is dandelions. Thankfully, we have patient neighbors.

Our Hero, the Bobcat

Finally, after being delayed by all that rain in May, we had some professional help. Glenn Bettencourt  came in with actual machines to move those pallets of brick and scrape off the topsoil to save to fill the eventual garden beds. He also was able to reuse the stone dust under the old patio as foundation for the new brick paths. The big reason we chose to work with him is because he was so willing to work with us: letting us do ourselves the parts we could to save on labor costs, giving great advice, lending us tools and teaching us to use them well. So it was a great day when I came home from work to see this:

Ok, it was actually a little unnerving to come home to find that the entire backyard no longer existed. On the other hand, this pretty neatly took care of our dandelion problem.

Here you can see crushed stone roughly laid in where a wide brick path will run along the back of the house. Also, the piles of soil are (not too accurately, as Kirk would discover) where raised planting beds will be.

The square of crushed stone is the pad for the new patio, which will be nestled within raised planting beds. If you look closely, the piles of loam give an idea of the outline of those beds. Sort of. Kirk ended up doing a lot of digging to get all that dirt into its final position. More on that next time.