My Free Seeds Have Arrived

Remember last week, when I posted about The Dinner Garden, an organization that offers free vegetable seeds to anyone who asks?  Well, yesterday, my free seeds arrived!

I was excited to open the package, because I didn't know what seeds I would be receiving.  While I do enjoy looking through stacks of seed catalogs, there's something liberating about not having to make any decisions whatsoever.

Here's what we ended up with:

• Parsnips
• Peas
• Broccoli
• Onions
• Red Cabbage
• Arugula
• Daikon Radish
• Mustard Greens
• Fenugreek

The first four are some of my favorites.  Red Cabbage and Arugula I like but don't eat frequently.  The last three I've never tried.  I know that Fenugreek is supposed to help female animals produce more milk, so maybe I'll feed some to my sheep when they're nursing lambs.

The one thing I realized about all these seeds is that they all seem to be ones that want to be planted early.  There's no tomato, corn, cucumber, pepper, seeds here that want to wait until the soil is much warmer.  Which means I have to hurry up and prepare the garden space!

The place where we want to put the garden is where the main horse paddock area used to be when we still had horses.  The soil is dreadfully compacted there, and huge weeds have grown up.  So we need to cut down and clear out the remains of all those tall weeds, and I'm planning to counteract the horrible soil compaction by making raised beds.

I wanted to make raised beds before this, but the cost of buying materials for the edges was more than I wanted to invest.  But last time Ken and I were walking around trying to figure out where to put new fence lines for the sheep, we discovered a large pile of discarded bricks in a little section of woods. 

I seem to remember that one of our neighbors told me that this house used to have a brick patio.  It looks like when the owners tore out the patio (Why would they do that?  It used to be exactly where we'd like to build a patio now!), they just threw all the bricks in a pile near the edge of the property.  So now, my plan is to go rescue all those bricks to use as edges for my raised beds.  It wasn't what I had originally been planning on, but, like my seeds from The Dinner Garden, it's free!