Vegetable Garden -- Part I

Well, I do not know what I am doing when it comes to gardening. I did not do much gardening as a kid, so Nick has taught me a lot. First off, Nick was taught by his dad, who is amazing in the garden. His dad recently showed us how their backyard via Skype and it looks like a little Oasis. We are not going for Oasis at this time, we are growing a vegetable garden. Yep...lots of edibles and I am soooo excited.  

This will be the first of a few posts about our vegetable garden, so I will call this the 'prepping' stage. 

First, we decided to do a raised garden bed. Nick went to Home Depot and bought three 3x8x12 untreated boards. Had them rip one in half to it made a 4’x8’ bed that was 12” high. Took 15 minutes to build the box with decking screws, then he coated in a Thompson water seal. The box was filled with 1 yard of garden mix from a local nursery. Nick filled up the back of his truck and shoveled it into the box. It cost $30 for the boards, $35 for the soil. Not bad!

We bought seeds at home depot and we are planting the following: bell peppers, zucchini, green beans, carrots, onion, lettuce, spinach, basil, cilantro, sweet potatoes and tomatoes all in that 1 garden box!!!!  We split box into  1 foot squares and planted the vegetables by the foot. 

Here are some great tools that Nick found to plan out our garden. 

Here’s planting schedules for our zone, you can find others on this website too:
http://www.thevegetablegarden.info/resources/planting-schedules/zones-5-6-planting-schedule

Here’s the garden plotter site where you can put in your garden size and it will tell you how many to plant in each location. Pay attention to the planting instructions and “learn more” at the bottom -  some really good info:
http://www.gardeners.com/on/demandware.store/Sites-Gardeners-Site/default/Page-KGPJS

Here’s a soil volume calculator if you’re doing raised beds:
http://www.gardeners.com/Soil-Calculator/7558,default,pg.html

So once we figured out what could be planted in the ground and what needed to stay inside until the chance of freeze was gone, we started. Here are our seedlings growing and tomato plants in the garage. 

We also built a gate so that we can get in and out of our garden and so it is protected from little pesky animals, like our dogs and rabbits. 

So Nick built the gate and then I made it pretty. We used our projector upstairs to project the design that I made onto the gate and we traced it with pencil. Then I took it into the garage and started painting. I am pretty happy with the way it turned out. 

The next post will have everything planted and our fence around the garden. I hope we have lots to eat this summer. 

Lastly, I am ending with a picture of Shiloh. She is getting so big, almost 50 pounds. Yikes!!

Hope this inspires you to get out there and garden!!!

- Court -