The Red Dirt Garden: Breaking Ground

With the success of our container plants (cherry tomatoes and zinnia flowers), my sister and I decided to start breaking ground. Yup, we were going to start digging up our backyard.

Here is our backyard, when we first started digging it up.

Now, we live in Wahiawa, Hawaii. On the island of Oahu. Wahiawa is known for it's dirt, because it is clay soil, and is brick red in color. Our small "country" town of Wahiawa is best recognized for it's ties to Dole Pineapple Plantation. Pineapple grows very well in red dirt, clay soil. I guess there's just a lot of "good stuff." in this type of dirt. But do not get jealous so fast, because I have learned that not everything grows well in red dirt. Perhaps in a blog post, I will go on about this more, but for now I'll stick to my story of digging up the yard.

Our yard has many negative things about it that I am constantly complaining about. Number one being that the soil is so so so so so hard. Because it is clay like, whenever the soil gets wet, and then dries from the sun, it compacts and becomes very hard. This made digging very time consuming and almost made us want to give up. Another thing that really sucked about our yard was that it was covered in California Grass. This is not your typical small and ugly weeds. No, this California grass LOVES wet soil (and clay soil is ALWAYS wet, deep down under the surface). It also loves sun and grows very rapidly. All that tall bright green grass that you see towards the back of the yard, near the brick wall is California Grass. It is also called "Elephant Grass" or "Razor Grass." This grass also has tiny little fiber glass fibers covering the blades. Let me just say, you do not want to be handling that stuff without gloves!

Even with gloves, the fibers would stick to them and you would still get little itchy, prickly fibers stuck on your hands and legs (if you wore shorts). The roots of this grass grows very deep into the ground, and since they grow in huge stalks, the roots all clump together and grow together, making digging them up and trying to get all the way to the bottom of them a real pain in the butt.

For two months my sister and I spent early mornings, and afternoons digging and digging. Occasionally my husband would come out and help us as well.

We took it day by day, hour by hour. We got sunburned and our entire bodies hurt.

But we kept going...loading up our barrel with weeds...separating and throwing out hundreds of rocks...always thinking of the end result...

Finally! When we felt we had cleared enough of the yard, We laid down a border using recycled bricks that our dad had collected. When the bordering was complete, I used a pick to dig up the ground and break it up even more. Then I used a hoe to level out the dirt. Once that was complete, I purchased about two huge bags of potting soil and dumped them into the garden area. Using the hoe I mixed the red dirt and the potting soil together and leveled it out once again.

When we had the skeleton of our garden finally done and the soil ready, we transplanted our cherry tomato plants and sunflowers. We left the zinnias and newly started sweet basil in the containers. We also started growing lettuce, beets, radishes, and jalapenos. Those were also transplanted into our newly made garden.