Growing a Small Organic Vegetable Garden : Part 1

Growing a small organic garden is a great way to spend your free time and has great payoffs, you get to grow your own food! This year i have decided grow a vegetable garden. I picked a spot, marked out some posts and got to work. It's been no easy task thus far, and I haven't even put any seeds in the ground yet! I've decided to document my progress in assuming that i will screw up eventually and someone else can learn from my mistakes. I'll be making lots of mistakes, I assure you.

What to do first...

First off, I live in the Paficic Northwest in a little area called Skagit Valley. About 45 mins north of Seattle with views of the San Juan Islands, Olympic Mountains, and Mount Baker, the Skagit valley is famous for its annual Tulip Festival and rich culture. The temperate climate and mild temperatures makes it a perfect place to grow some vegetables. We grow organic vegetables here. It's no wonder farms in Skagit Valley were recently recognized as protected farmland.


I know a garden will grow here, it's just a matter of me not screwing it up. I attempted to do some research as to what specific strains grow well in the area but i became impatient and decided to experiment and find out for myself. So i bought them all.

Getting down and dirty

I'm currently using a craftsman tiller, as you can see in the picture to the right. It's a very powerful tiller but the ground in the area is fairly rocky with some small logs so I have been going through sheer pins like crazy. It's very good soil though so it's worth the time and effort. I eventually gave up using the tiller until i could get all the roots/weeds and rock out of the dirt with shovels. Had the girlfriend out there working too, she wasn't very happy with me.

Some other tools we were using:

• Shovel
• Rake
• Pick Ax (removing rocks and stump)
• Hoe

After getting all the rocks, weeds, and a small stump out, I was able to then till up the ground a little bit more in able to create some mounded rows of dirt. Interesting things happen when your "playing" in dirt, dogs decide they want to help. After watching our three poodles digging up our hard work, I decided it was time to invest in a fence.

The nice thing about living in the country is there is material all around you. With 10 Acres of forested land, fence posts were not scarce. In all, we used a total of three, 6 inch diameter Alder trees to create the posts for the fence. 16 posts, each at about 6 feet in length. Was a lot of work, but well worth the effort. Alder is a much harder wood and is can dull a chainsaw blade quickly. Since the logs being used were small in diameter, I decided to use an ax to cut down the tree's instead of the chain saw.  OK, i'll admit it, I just like using an ax and pretending i'm a viking. You can't say you wouldn't do the same.

After digging the holes for the posts, I couldn't decide if i should fill around the posts with cement or gravel. I figured cement would help the posts last longer, but since i did not de-bark the posts i figured they were going to decay fairly quickly anyways and decided to go with gravel to pack the posts in. Less work overall so I was happy with the decision.

At this point, I have all posts in the ground with a few of the fence posts still needing to be packed in. After this is done, I will go get some fencing material and use an air compressed staple gun to attach the fence material to the posts. I'll also leave an opening for a gate. But this will be in the next segment.

I will continue working on my small organic vegetable garden. Hopefully i can post some more updates soon.

To be continued...