Building my Garden

As soon as we bought our house I knew I wanted to have a garden to grow vegetables, herbs, and maybe try my hand at some fruit.  We use a lot of fresh tomatoes in the summer and a lot of canned tomatoes during the winter, so it only makes sense to grow my own.  I also love cooking with fresh herbs but often the ones I buy in the grocery store are already in rough shape or wilt in no time flat when I get them home.

At first I thought we would just dig out the grass, till up the dirt and plant.  But I quickly decided that was a bad idea.  The previous owner of our home wasn't much for watering the grass and a large portion of the backyard has reverted to prairie grass, complete with fox tails, so I didn't want battle for growing space.  Plus I like the idea of a raised garden bed so that I don't have to crawl through all the dirt to get to my veggies, and hopefully the dogs won't tear through a raised bed.  Hopefully... (This has already proven to not work).  John had been itching to get his hands on a summer building project so this was right in his wheel house.

 

Square, U-shape, rectangle, so many options for a raised bed.  After cruising Pinterest, thinking about what and how much I wanted to grow, I decided on an E-shaped bed.  Out to the yard I went to measure out the size of the space I was working with.  I then drew a to-scale plan on a sheet of graph paper, complete with measurements of my garden.  This is an integral step as it not only tells you how much lumber your going to need, it also lets you calculate how much dirt you will need.

This garden has a massive 126 sq ft of planting space.  This should be more than enough space for us to grow a variety of vegetable and will also give us some room to grow.  Now because I am a planner I decided to map out exactly where I was going to plant the different vegetables.  Yes this is a little overkill but it will be a great help when I head out to the greenhouses to buy my plants!  I left some empty space in my garden in case I come across some interesting vegetables or fruits while I was at the greenhouse. 

What I decided to plant:

Tomatoes                       Beets

Green Peppers               Basil 

  Yellow Peppers             Parsley

 Chili Peppers                Thyme

   Green Onion                  Chives 

 Carrots                               Dill

      Cucumber                     Asparagus

         Peas                              Watermelon

        Green Beans                 Strawberries

Now it's time to build!  We started out by spray painting the location of the beds onto the grass and digging out the grass.  This way we didn't have to keep measuring and referring to the plan while we were digging the grass out!  Then John went about cutting and screwing the boards together to form the frame of the garden.  Because we used 2x12 boards we needed to support them with wood stakes at the corners to keep the boards for bowing under the weight of the dirt, which John pounded in once the frame was complete.

Luckily John knows a guy that has a livestock business.  Why is that convenient when building a garden you ask?  Well he has dirt that has cow manure mixed in with it and he could deliver it to our house!  Super handy when you need 5 yards of dirt, which is approximately 2 half ton loads.  *TIP - when having dirt delivered to your house, lay a tarp down before the load gets there.  This way there isn't near as much dirt stuck the the driveway that you have to sweep/wash away!

 

 

Time for the fun part, planting!!!  Quite quickly I realized that my plant-o-gram was not going to materialize the same way I had drawn it.  The tomatoes ended up taking up more space than I intended so I had to jostle everything else around.  Thankfully it all still fit. 

Unfortunately I made the mistake of trying to get a jump start on the growing season and paid the ultimate price.  I lost most of my tomato plants, a large portion of my pepper plants and all of my basil to a night of frost.  Lesson learned.  So back to the greenhouse Roman and I went to buy replacement plants. 

Now that the new plants are in the garden, all that is left to do is water and wait for the sunshine and delicious food to sprout from the ground!