When I started thinking about my garden earlier this year, I envisioned my garden looking and functioning in certain ways.

The first thing I envisioned was doing my garden in strips, basically instead of tilling a huge piece of dirt up for plants I only wanted to till where I would put the plants. My husband got that done for me and it looked great.

The next thing I wanted to do was put down something that would smother the weeds. Every 7 years we allow our land to rest, last year was our rest year so there were a lot of weeds that grew and needed to be dealt with this year or my garden would be overrun with them.

I had some old newspaper leftover from the winter so I decided to use it as a barrier but I knew I would have to put something on top to help hold it down and I also knew this is where money would come in, something that had stopped me up until now. I decided that no matter how much I spent it would be worth it, I have been taking and taking from my dirt for years never giving anything in return.

A few days ago I decided to stop at Menard’s to see what they had, I found a really good organic mulch/compost that I knew would be perfect. I only bought 3 bags so I could try it out and I loved how it looked so much that I’ll have to go back for more but here is what part of my garden looks like now,

Here is another picture,

You can clearly see the paper underneath with my compost/mulch on top.

I keep telling my kids that you need to work smarter not harder. Making my vision a reality will cut down on labor, disturbing nature, it will help retain moisture for those dry days that come in the summer, and everything I added will help build more soil and add worms and microorganisms to help future plants grow.

I love seeing my vision become reality, I was so excited about doing it that it surprised me how quickly and easily it got done. For the first time my mind had fun instead of seeing what I was doing in the garden as work.