Raised Bed #1 - Planted!

From Gardening

This is the last picture I took of the growing garden today. It was a simple process, but long, especially since we are planting FOUR raised beds eventually.

We had built the frames for the beds earlier in the week, and started out by moving them into the backyard.

From Gardening

Yesterday we went and purchased 32 cubic feet of peat moss, mushroom compost, and garden soil, to fill our 8x4x1 raised bed. Just for one! I'm keeping track of the costs of all of these to report on later. This is what 32 cubic feet looks like in bags. We ended up not using all of it, because they expanded to fill the space when we unpacked the bags, mixed it together, and watered it in between layers.

From Gardening

Before positioning the raised bed, Nathaniel stapled weed blocking mat to the bottom, just to make all of it easier. We didn't want to kill the grass or dig it up, that would be so much extra work! We bought the least expensive staple gun, which was almost unusable with the density of the wood. We measured the length of the brick stones we want to put around and in between the beds, and just positioned the first one officially before filling it with the soil/compost/peat moss mixture.

From Gardening

Hmm, somehow I didn't end up in any of the photos, but since we are using the square foot gardening technique, we did take the time to lay out the squares. I put nails around the perimeter at 1 ft increments, and then we cut and tied twine to the nails. I didn't want as much space taken up by slats as I have seen in some examples, but didn't want to just eyeball it either. It really made it so much easier when we were planting. Since I had my chart, I knew exactly where each plant would be going. Some were seedlings, some were seeds. Some are reserved for the seeds I planted in the garage, and some are reserved for marigolds that can't be planted quite yet. But today we planted carrots, beets, radishes, lettuce, spinach, broccoli, cauliflower, one cabbage (most are in the garage), and peas. I've heard it might snow Tuesday, but "mights" are often wrong.