Hey guys & gals, many of you have asked what I do to get my soil ready for the spring and fall so I decided to put a little something together to share with you. I took a lot of advice from helpful friends and added in my own research to come up with this recipe and it has done wonders for me this year.

First, you need to have compost. Now I am not going to be a compost snob and say you must make your own. I know some people can't do it for whatever reason...not enough space, neighborhood regulations and so on...that’s okay, but if you really want the good stuff check Craigslist or call a local farm. Most of the time they have very good composted manures that are very cheap!

When I start to fill my beds (4x4 square beds and the long ones are 3x12) with compost and composted manure I also add peat moss, mushroom compost and 4-6 cups of Dolomite lime mixed in very well. If it's available to you, you can also add vermiculite or perlite which will help hold in moisture and make the soil lighter. Just make sure you mix everything in evenly.

Next I gather all the plants I plan on planting and the amendments I add to the soil when I plant them. I mix these amendments in a bucket with 50% compost so that I can put 2 cups of the mixture into each planting hole before adding in the plant. The recipe you should use is: ½ cup Dolomite lime ¼ cup rock phosphate ¼ cup Epsom salt ½ cup dry molasses ( also works great at keeping ants out of the garden) 2 cups Texas green sand 2 cups garden tone ( Most of the items I found at the local farm/feed store or at any of the big box stores. You can also order them online)

After adding the amendments and the plant, be sure to water it well and that's it! Just remember that sometime in the middle of the growing year take the same mixture and scratch it in around all of your plants to give them an extra boost! I am sure there are many ways to improve your soil but this is what works for me. I hope this will also help you to grow a strong and productive garden. If you have any questions regarding this recipe or the methods I use please leave a comment below or you can contact me directly at Thesmalltowngardener@gmail.com .

How It All Began.

If a couple years ago some one told me I would be growing a garden I would have thought “LOL, ya right...you must be crazy!!!” But here I am growing a family garden in my back yard!

You are probably wondering “So how did you get started growing a garden?” Well, It all started last year when I lost my job. I was at home and my wife and I had just started really getting into watching YouTube. You may be thinking “Come on man, get with the the times...everyone uses YouTube!!” Not us. Instead we spent every chance we got playing a certain popular online MMORPG that I shall not name but WoW...did it take up my time!

Every day we would come home and play. Our weekends were spent running dungeons, grinding gold and goofing off with friends and really doing nothing but gaining weight and becoming hermits. Then my wife saw a YouTube channel of someone gardening and said "Hey! You need to check this out."

So, I sat there and watched it and thought, “Okay, this is kind of entertaining.” We ended up watching at least 35-40 gardening videos that night. After a couple of days of watching more of the gardening videos, my wife and I decided to give it a try! We thought “Why not?” We could be growing lots of our own food, eating better, getting exercise as well as lots of fresh air! If we see we can't do it then at least we can say we tried.

So the adventure had begun, we went to the local Big Box store and came across a book on square foot gardening so we picked it up along with some of the items it suggested. We bought the wood, soil and amendments we would need. Some items were easy to find like peat moss and mushroom compost but vermiculite was no where to be found. After calling around to many places we ended up finding it at a farm & feed store a couple of towns over. So we hopped in the car and made the trip to pick up three big bags.

When we arrived back at the house we ventured into the backyard that we rarely ever stepped foot into. Heck!, we didn't even want to mow it for crying out loud and yet there we were starting to grow a vegetable garden!?! Even the neighbors looked at us crazy like “What are you guys doing outside?” and “Who are you??”

We began by cleaning up the backyard and making the square foot gardening boxes from the directions in the book we picked up. Once we placed them where we wanted, we mixed the soil and filled our boxes. We basically followed the book or the videos we watched on YouTube. The rest we played by ear.

I will tell you this...my wife and I, who were known for being techie nerds, was out of our element playing in the dirt. Sure, we both grew up with parents that had a small garden from time to time, but we never really grew anything on our own and never really gave it much thought. Yet, there we were hundreds of dollars invested in wood, soil and plants.

To keep track of our achievements and failures, I bought a video camera to make videos to post on YouTube and The Small Town Gardener was born.

The first year was rough, we had flooding followed by 71 rainless days along with temperatures of over 100 degrees. You can go back and watch some of the videos and you will see some of the plants that looked pretty scary, however, it did not stop us. We persisted through over-watering, under-watering, and picking off all the leaves for some strange reason and ya' know what? We had a great time and learned a lot!

When we were not working in the garden I researched everything I could by making a list of all of the plants we grew and read up on them, talked about them with other YouTube gardeners and watched all the videos I could about them.

I found that many people don't share everything they know or they think that what they do know is not worth sharing. I also found out which soil amendments work well in the garden and which ones don't. Am I an expert? Nope! And I don't think I ever will be but, I can tell you this...You can make it work for you if you choose to take the time and listen.

I am here to show you what I have learned so far and the rest we can learn together. We will learn from the good, the bad, and the funny, we might even meet some great friends along the way.....Oh, and in case you were wondering I no longer play online games anymore. Instead, I spend time with my lovely wife and kids and play in the dirt :)