Introduction

Two couples, Paul & Evelyn and Nick & Amanda, have teamed up together to build a produce garden in their shared Nashville backyard entirely out of recyclables, compostables, and spending the least amount of money as humanly possible.

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Paul & Evelyn are two cool individuals that primarily eat organically/vegetarian and have created a garden together before. They dream about one day running a self-sustaining farm together and building a house entirely out of straw bales, which sounds a little crazy, but if you think about it that's REALLY economical... grass is absolutely everywhere and grows like a weed. They aim to anchor this farm on a patch of healthy land in between Nashville and Knoxville, the cities their two families are from. They are vegetarians, both currently in school, have a black cat named Marcus that is trained to use the toilet, a dog named Britches that licks the dirt a lot, a turtle named Smee, and some assorted fish.

Nick & I (Amanda) are two newly married individuals that never have attempted to grow a garden together, although growing up our parents made us work in theirs. Nick once lived on a farm in Ohio and I am from a small, simple little town -- so we are pretty used to getting dirty, working in the yard, and we are not afraid of bugs (well, maybe cockroaches and poisonous spiders). Although we do not eat organically, it currently is out of our budget with all my piles of student loans, we are super excited and filled with anticipation at the prospect of having fresh, healthy and full-tasting produce later this year. Nick and I reuse & recycle, but we have not really got on the popular "green" bandwagon... we are excited to learn as Paul and Evelyn teach us more about how to reuse and choose items to build a garden that is better for our environment, and compostable!

Evelyn (with her passion and dream for having a self-sustaining farm) is basically like our CEO/Project Manager of the Warfield Garden. She has been researching this project for the past few months, practically all winter. It was her brilliant idea to create a raised garden bed out of straw bales for our backyard, since our soil is all rocky and hard, and I will write more detail on our construction in a later post.

The boys, Paul and Nick, are obviously the muscle of the project. Good strong men are great resources to have in the early stages of garden development.

I, Amanda, will be documenting this process in writing, just for fun, and maybe to help out other Nashvillians looking for information on building an organic and environmentally conscious garden that will lower their grocery bills and make them feel really, really "green."

We welcome gardening advice and the sharing of great information resources from any of our readers!