Gardening Adventures

15 April 2026

For the last couple of weeks, I've been getting into gardening, specifically vegetable gardening!

I've been practically glued to screens for most of my life, and for reasons that I may explain in a different post, this year I have decided to change my relationship with screens and the digital world as a whole; you would be correct to guess that this is part of the reason this website exists.

I went to my local Menard's hardware store and picked up 12 grape tomato starts. I have basically no experience with gardening or even taking care of plants, so I picked up a lot more than I needed with the assumption that I would accidentally kill most of them. I understand the basics of gardening and have been doing a lot of reading, so I feel optimistic, but I also need to keep that confidence in check lest I be sorely disappointed. I planted them in two locations - six of them at the head of my driveway, the other six in my back yard near my firepit. The six I planted in the backyard also have wooden stakes to give them support as they grow. The soil in my backyard is better, and I wanted to see what difference not having a support stake would make to the group I planted at the front of the house, so that's my excuse for doing things that way.

Throughout the week, I've also been picking up supplies and tools. I borrowed a shovel and a line trimmer from a friend, picked up a garden hose and hook to hang it on, as well as a neat little kit of gardening tools that included a fork, trowel, and carrying bag. I used the shovel to dig out some paver stones from their gravel prison, all of which was left on my property by the previous owner as the steps into a camper-turned-spare-bedroom that has fallen into severe disrepair and that frankly I just need to get rid of. The paver stones have been repurposed into the container of a shallow-raised garden bed, placed in the location that I originally wanted to use for my garden planted directly in the yard.

Unfortunately for me, that location was also used by the previous owner for something else that was left to rot - carpeting! Yes, big sheets of indoor carpet left out in the yard eventually to be buried by top soil and grasses to blend in with the rest of the yard, giving almost no indiciation to their existence. Why? Why would someone do this? Apparently, this is where the previous owner had a kiddie-pool set up for their daughters (now my friends) many years ago. The pool eventually went away, but the carpet was left behind. The result is that the soil underneath the carpeting, which is only buried about an inch deep in topsoil and grass, is completely unusuable for growing without significant work. As a result of that, I'm building a raised bed on top of that area to grow new stuff on and hopefully do some work to revitalize that soil over time.

I built the raised bed yesterday evening after work, and have been working on filling it with high-quality soil collected from other locations on my property. I also obtained a healthy dose of compost from a friend as well, and implanted both the afforementioned tomato plants as well as my new raised bed with some of it just to really over-charge the soil with fresh nutrition. I'm having my own rotating compost bin identical to my friend's delivered to my house by the end of the week, so that I can create and use my own compost for such projects. Finally, I planted some onion starts into the raised bed which is just a couple meters away from the backyard tomatoes, the idea being that I can both have my own onions as well as protect my tomatoes from woodland critters that don't enjoy the smell of onions.

Overall, this has been a very exciting and rewarding project to embark upon, even though I've basically seen no results yet. More updates to come soon!