I finally got back to work on the gardens. I got the trenches dug for the water lines about a month ago and had started digging the trenches for the gardens after that.
But we had not had any rain for about 3 months and the ground was harder than concrete. Even with the tractor I could barely dig through it. My plan was to dig 2 garden trenches about 50 feet long and about 5 feet wide and about 2 feet deep. But the ground was so hard I could barely get them 3 feet wide and well less than 2 feet deep. Even then, I could not even get them close to running straight.
My plan was to wait for the monsoons and hope they softened up the ground enough to dig, otherwise I was going to have to do it by hand using the pressure washer to break the ground up. That works pretty well, but it is a VERY slow and dirty process.
Well, I got my wish and we had a little over 2 inches of rain on Wednesday and Thursday last week. The rain filled the trenches and the water sat in them until today. Even after 4 days, one of the trenches still had standing water in it! So today I got out there with the tractor and got everything dug down nice and straight and as deep as I wanted to go!
This is HUGE win because I really did not want to be digging them by hand!
So now all I have to do is finish plumbing the irrigation lines and get some shoring in the sides of the trenches so the rains do not wash the sides into them. Then I can start filling them up with compost, manure and soil. I am going to be VERY glad to have this project behind me. This has been one of those projects that I knew I had to do, but it has been absolute torture to get motivated to do it.
These are actually the 3rd design for the gardens. My original plan was to do the cast concrete which I detailed here. My 2nd plan was to build raised beds out of steel but I just could not come up with an idea that I thought would look nice. The idea for these was Mrs Inor's and from how well they held the rain water this week, I think it is going to work out brilliantly. Here in the desert, we do not need to worry about water drainage. Our problem is the opposite; we need to keep as much water as possible in the gardens. The other concern we have is wind. So I am going to leave the garden soil about 6-8 inches below grade. That should give young plants a modicum of protection from the wind.