here we go

I kind of thought that once I built the garden that the plants would go in the ground and start growing. And by growing I mean producing vegetables. Did I mention I'm new at this?

In reality it took me about a week to get plants in the box once it was built. Here's what I put in for a spring crop:

And here's what it looked like:

To start the garden I used seedlings from the coop. At the same time I started some of my own seeds indoors just to see what happened. For seeds I started tomatoes, cilantro, spinach, and peppers. I didn't take any early pictures of these guys, but here are some terrible pictures of what they looked like after a few weeks:

tomatoes and cilantro

tomatoes, cilantro, peppers and spinach

I started a garden

Now that I'm back living upstate (in a huge apartment with a yard!), I've been itching to start a garden. This is kind of a weird thing for me, because I have many-a childhood memory of torturous afternoons weeding in my mom's garden. And even though we put in lots of hard work, our gardens never seemed to produce anything. Needless to say, I hated gardening.

More recently I've tried to keep plants, mainly potted ones inside. Even though I've enjoyed keeping these plants I always seemed to kill them. Even bamboo. Which is supposed to be impossible to kill.

So, with my non-stellar track record I was as surprised as everyone else when I decided I wanted to try my hand at gardening. Mostly I was interested because I wanted to find new ways to go outside and I enjoy doing "domestic" things. For example last fall I learned how to can, and I wanted to see what else I could do to be more self-sufficient.

My mom started gardening again last year after she bought the book Square Foot Gardening. She had so much success that she couldn't give away her harvest fast enough AND there were virtually no weeds. Sold.

Square food gardening is a system which uses raised beds and a specific dirt mix, which helps eliminate a lot of waste energy involved in traditional row gardening. It conceptualizes garden space differently so you can grow plants closer together, and gardeners are encouraged to plant three crop cycles each year - spring, summer, and fall. The book is a little hokey (it's almost like reading an info-merical), but my mom and her black thumb had so much success I figured I'd give it a shot.

So I borrowed her book and enlisted my dads help. First, we had to pick the location. The raised bed is 4 foot square. I wanted to put it in my backyard, but since my landlord is particular and I'm a new tenant I figured he wouldn't be too pleased if I just went at it in his yard (also he lives next door). Not deterred I asked Twig if I could use his house. He bought the house, and it's weird rose/tomatillo (!?#?) garden, last year. He welcomed the idea of using the space for vegetables, so long as I did all the work and he got to eat some of the harvest. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I became a modern sharecropper.

Anyway, it sounded fine to me since I'm there so much anyway, so me, my dad, Dave and Twig set out to build the bed on one of the first nice spring days.  I think the wood for the raised bed and a roll of chicken wire cost about $30, and I stole what I could from my parent's left over supplies. From them I got that black weed-cloth stuff, some of the special dirt mix, a plastic tarp, a shovel, and power tools. It took a full afternoon to build the box, which could have gone faster except that we were fairly leisurely about it. We also didn't have enough dirt, so we had to make another trip to the hardware store to fill 'er up.

I'd say I've spent around $100 to make the special dirt mix (!>#?!#*!^), but I could have done it cheaper if I though ahead better. The mixture is made of equal parts: compost (free from the city dump, if I had made that effort), vermiculite (sold in small bags - expensive, which I bought - or in huge bags - way more cost effective, which I should have bought), and peat moss.  So word to the wise, buy in bulk. You will need it, and it's way cheaper that way.

I wish I had a picture of the final product to include here, but I didn't think to take any at the time. Instead I offer you a picture of someone elses and a picture of the neighborhood pet/pest (depending on who you ask).

from the SFG website, but mine looks the same.

Charlie!