Friday, May 6, 2011

The Beginnings of a Vegetable Garden

This year Richard and I decided to make a vegetable garden. It's my little project... Actually, it's not so little. We built three raised beds, which took a lot of work. It started by digging up all the weeds and grass in the middle of the backyard.



Then we purchased lumber and started building our beds, placed the beds in their spots, and lined the bottom with cardboard. Having cardboard at the bottom keeps weeds from growing. This is our smallest bed, which is 3'x3'.



For the soil, we used a combination of compost, peat moss, and vermiculite.



My mom told me about this great gardening idea called the square foot garden. It's for people who want to max out their garden in a small space using raised beds. The idea is you section off your garden into squares that are one foot wide. Each plant has different space requirements within the square. For example, you can grow 1 tomato plant per square, 1 pepper plant, 9 green onion plants, and 16 carrots. If you're interested in the square foot garden, I recommend looking at this site. It contains a lot of information and I now follow the blog. Some plants require multiple squares. Squash needs 9 squares. That's the size of my small box, so we planted a yellow crooked neck squash plant. He needs a name. How about Yellow (I'm so creative ;0) )? Meet Yellow, my first garden plant!



Stay tuned to see how Yellow does this season...

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