The Vegetable Garden Update: June 5

The beds aren't all filled yet, but we're making progress. The veggie starts I mentioned last time have been planted -- we have one whole box of canteloupe plants because we are fruit crazy! The other 6 x 2 box has the tomatoes, peppers, onions, and zucchini -- and also a piece of window screen to keep those pesky deer from nibbling through the fence! The corn and romaine went into the north end of one of the cinder block beds, though I don't think the corn will grow fast enough to shade the romaine if the weather ever warms up.

Next up: plant the lobelia still in its 6-pack, put up trellises for the melons and tomatoes to climb, get seeds in, and move the rest of that compost! I don't want to know how many wheelbarrow trips it takes to move 4.5 cubic yards...

The Vegetable Garden Update: June 1

So here it is, our starting point for our vegetable garden. We've had the herbs in containers on the porch for almost a month, but we had to wait to start the rest of the garden. The first order of business (after Other Half rented a mini loader for my birthday to clear the area), was to build the fence to deer-proof the whole thing. The deer are so bad where we live that we've even had them follow us down the driveway and I have no intentions of putting in a deer buffet!

Now that the fence and (most of) the beds are in, I ordered 4.5 cubic yards of compost to fill them. I was going to go with the Square Foot Gardening mix of equal parts compost, peat moss, and vermiculite, but after a bit of reading, we decided to plant in straight compost -- we'll find out as the summer goes on if that was a wise move!

Bug and I walked down to the local garden center this morning to load up her wagon with starts, so we've got cantaloupe, tomatoes, peppers (jalapeno & bell), zucchini, corn, romaine, and onion waiting to go in, along with all sorts of seeds they picked out last week. They say "monsoon-like" rain is headed our way tomorrow, so I'd better get those starts in! Then it's time to weed the berry patch we put in last year...

Raised Garden Beds a la Knock Off Wood

So have you seen Knock-Off Wood, the site by blogger extraordinaire Ana White? This woman is incredible! Since October, she's posted nearly 200 plans to help people build real furniture on a real budget. This woman is going places, I tell ya.

I first discovered her site a few months ago and while I drooled over lots of her plans, it was her plans for the the ultra-cheap raised cedar beds that had me begging Other Half for a lesson in how to use his chop saw. I had lots of help from him in putting our garden beds together (two at 6' x 2' and one at 6' x 1'), but I can say that I cut every board, drove every screw and hammered in every nail. Other Half was so proud, he even took a pic as I finished:
Close-up of my hammer work:
My first bed, the "baby":
And here they are installed along the veggie garden fence. The first bed is only 1 foot deep so that I can maneuver the wheelbarrow and such in through the gate (where I'm standing.)
And those first 3 were so fun that we built two more, a bit different from the first set. The first set was out of cedar fence pickets (only $1.59 each), but we built these 6' x 4' ones out of 5/4" cedar planking. And yes, they're upside down in this photo! I had stapled on the weed barrier, but they're waiting for their base layer to be prepped there to the left of the cinder block beds (which were much more expensive and time-consuming to build, by the way)
I'll take you on a tour of the veggie garden one of these days-- the compost is waiting to be put in all of those beds...