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Building the Garden

By Gwen ⋅ July 17, 2008 ⋅

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The New Garden

So it’s been a little while since I’ve blogged, but I’m back! We had an amazing trip to Europe and got home ready to finish our garden preparations! Let’s get you caught up on what we have been working on.

We build a 3 foot cedar fence around our garden area since we have high winds and lots of furry little friends running around. In figuring out the positioning of our raised gardens we calculated the 4×8 boxes we originally built and were going to use and we could only fit 2 boxes in (64 square feet). Then we decided to reevaluate and see what other options we had to maximize the space we had. So we measured the perimeter of our fencing and had nearly 60 feet, take that times 2 feet and we had 120 square feet to garden in! Wow! We just doubled our garden space! I might also mention that before building our planters we set in underground water lines to come up to each bed and we will have individual drip lines to each square.

Next, as we were building our raised gardens and screwing it into our fence we were laying a sheet of wire underneath to prevent any unwanted rodents from digging their way up through our garden. Followed by a layer of weed barrier tarp on top.

Now we were ready to mix our soil. Remember we were using 1 part Peat moss, 1 part vermiculite, and 1 part compost. Here we have pictured that we purchased 7 different brands of compost mixture as they are all so different and manufactured in different regions so we want a little of all of them.

We found that 12 cubic feet of compost, 1 large bag of Peat Moss and 1 large bag of vermiculite were about the same in volume. So we laid a large tarp out and started mixing.

We have mixed our very own blend of soil here that is going to be very good at retaining moisture, easy to till up with our fingers and our veggies are going to love it!

We filled our raised beds with our soil mixture and watered down to keep from blowing around. We used 4 of our mixes to fill the beds. So 1 mixture covered about 25-30 square feet of 12” deep beds.

Then we used wood lath slats to make our square feet. We purchased the wood lath at our local home improvement store for about $0.66 each for a 6 foot piece. We drilled holes and used bolts to hold the centers together and screwed the outer edges down. We also covered our walk way with mulch as we did not want to use rock since it would attract the heat and is not as cozy to walk on.

Now we are ready to plant! We followed the square foot gardening spacing from Mel Bartholomew’s Square Foot Gardening book to plant our seeds. For instance; in one square foot we put 1 spinach seed, in another we could put 4 corn seeds, and in another we could put 16 carrot seeds. It is just a matter of the spacing needed for each vegetable. Now we only planted the left side and back of our garden with a variety of all our veggies. In about 2-3 weeks we will plant them again on the right side of our garden so we have harvest twice on all veggies!

As you notice in the pictures we have some growth already, don’t let me fool you. We started seeds inside and were not successful at maintaining them so went to our local nurseries and purchased our tomato, pepper, and strawberry plants. They were much healthier than ours. We might try again next year with the seeds, but then again maybe not!  In the center isle we made just a 1 foot square raised bed and this is where all of our strawberries are! Yummmm! And randomly we also planted some annual flowers we purchased to decorated our garden with more color this summer!

Now that everything is in, which for note we planted on Memorial weekend here in Colorado, we are ready to watch as the seeds begin to germinate. We should see a lot of growth here in the next 10-14 days. We will keep you posted and start talking about some of the different veggies that we have planted as we wait for harvesting!

We would love to see pictures and hear stories of your gardening! Please comment on our garden blog and send pictures to us at info@mairecipes.com