Mary, Mary, how does your garden grow?

Well, mine won't be cockelshells and all the other stuff in Mary Quite Contrary's garden - but it's about that time to be thinking ahead, isn't it?

So, the last two years my garden has been a complete and utter failure...  a flop...  a waste of water and time...  frustrating and often beyond pointless!  Our soil is mostly clay and/ or gumbo, our winds can rip through just about anything, including blowing plants over, pushing tomato cages sideways, and well, you get the idea.

This year I'm hoping things are different.  For starters I heard about a couple of things I can do to improve my growing area - I could spend thousands of dollars (that I don't even come close to having) to improve our soil quality, OR I can make raised garden beds...  gee, guess what we're doing??  Then, talking with a friend who is an absolute genius with plants and gardens, I got the tip to put my planter boxes (just the 4 walls/ frames) down in their designated places and then to layer the bottom with cardboard (cool - saves us a trip to the recycling place!!!) and then pile with manure (no problem there, our horses have been obliging us with LOTS of that...) and let it compost...  top with soil and plants!

Then I heard about another method...  the hugelkulture - interesting stuff...  you can read more about it on a guy's blog who has cool equipment and way more knowledge than me here:  http://www.pierresoleil.com/ourblog/?ny0wOYCy

So, the guy we bought our house from had this huge pile of firewood (and yet, the house has no fireplace... yet...)  so we gave a lot of it away last fall to people in our homeschool group who actually do have fireplaces!  Well, we had a lot of little chunks of wood and scraps and chips and...  all still piled up behind the barn, and I've been wanting to get it all cleaned up and hauled away - well, no problem - send the kids out with the wagon and wheelbarrow and have them pick up all of those little pieces of wood to haul to the garden for me, where I dump them into the garden boxes and pile over the top with manure... 

It's not exactly the hugelkulture method, but combined methods of two tried and true methods...  I'm hoping for good results!

Now to find a way to combat the wind...  I've thought about putting boards up around the lower half of our garden's fence (used to be a large dog run - I use it as a fenced garden to keep children and critters from playing in it!) but that would block some of the sun...  so I"m not really sure if that will work or not...  or what I'll end up doing for that respect - but there's time to figure it out yet :)

Praying this proves to be a far-less-expensive way to produce a good garden with decent soil/ growing medium!