Taylor and I first started dating in 2013. In that time, she’s campaigned for three major changes: a new dog (which we got,) a wonderful wedding (which we absolutely got,) and a new house (you guessed it, we got one!)

In that same time span, I’ve campaigned for three major things: a flock of chickens (topic is taboo in our house,) a flamethrower from Elon Musk (didn’t happen,) and an urban farm. Saturday we broke ground on a small 1,500 square foot vegetable garden!

This is a first for us, but in a few hours of cultivating our land, we made a lot of progress, learned a lot, and even got a new pet!

How We’re Doing It

We’re digging 16 rows which will grow 16 varieties of vegetables, and 2 different fruits. Although we’re sure there are going to be tons of mistakes as we learn some good practices, we’re also pretty confident that we’ll have a high yield, if not for the sheer volume of food that we’ll be growing. 1,500 square feet, as it turns out, is a pretty big plot of land to grow food on.

Digging plots was a lot harder than it looked like, and after five hours, this was all that we were able to accomplish:

For reference, that’s our house and fenced-in part of our back yard in the back of this photo.

So we dug two out of 16 rows this Sunday. That’s not terrible, because we’re still about 8 weeks from our first planting, so there’s plenty of time to get everything in order. But, we learned very quickly that this was going to take a lot of work (and raking!)

Both beds were dug by hand using this ancient technology, ordered from Amazon:

As you can see, I was way too excited to get started that I neglected to remove the label.

One more really cool thing happened on Saturday. In addition to 2 dog, a salamander and a crested gecko, we welcomed a new pet into the family.

As I was digging the first row, I noticed a tiny, oddly-shaped rock. I picked it up and it tried to run away from me. Odd, I thought, considering that rocks usually stay put, even when they’re scared; that made me investigate further, and I discovered that I was actually holding a tiny little turtle..

This tiny little guy seriously fit in the palm of Taylor’s hands. Super cool!

I’ll keep updating this every Monday, so stay tuned! Thanks for reading!