First year at our new home

Here's a couple pics of our garden (1st year) at our new home!

March 2, 2009 - Covered with snow!

New beginnings...

We are going to do a slightly raised bed. Here's the area.

Our dirt pile yet to be moved...

Preparing the lower soil...

Removed the grass and tilled in some amendments. Still going to add a top layer of better dirt.

More tilling....

The beds are taking shape.,..

The beds are different shape because we wanted it to be visually appealing!

Here's the first go around.

We have plans for:
Asparagus
Strawberries
Tomatoes
Peppers
Squashes
Peas
Beans
Corn
Spinach
Broccoli
Brussel Sprouts
Cucumbers
Melons
Cauliflower
and herbs...

I'm going to trellis quite a few vegetables I hope...

It's April now!

Here's the beginnings of trellis'

Painting the trellis' so they look nice!

The trellis' are supported by 2 - 48" long x 1/2" round rebar driven about 2 feet into the ground.

One of our cats... nothing to do with the garden!

Here's the netting on some of the trellis'

I built this copper frame for out peas and other trellised veggies. Hopefully it will color nicely in time...

Added some color with Marigolds...

Here's the beginning of our herb patch...

I was 1 block short of making it more square so I rounded one of the corners. It really bugs my daughter that it is different from the other beds so I thought I'd leave it that way!

Our Raspberry bush!

And our Blueberry bush...

April 26th! It's way to early to be this hot...

Some of our tomatoes, carrots, beets and parsnips...

Brussel sprouts.... grow baby grow!

Our Asparagus and Strawberries...

Peas and Cucumbers... well, the cucumbers went through a freeze and died.. so did some of the tomato plants. So I reseeded the cucumbers and they are doing well now. 4 of the 6 tomato plants survived the freeze and recovered too.

Our Strawberries and a toad house...

Umm.. is 24 zukes, yellow crook/straight necks and butternut too many?

Our little composter.... we also have worms inside.

Our family managed to reduce our trash from 2 pickups a week to 1 pickup a week. Our recycling now goes out once every 2-3 weeks instead of every week. The worms eat most everything and the outdoor pile is doing well too.

The Asparagus crowns (1 year olds) sprouted! But to date it appears only 11-12 crowns of the 50 planted have grown... Going to have to figure out if they are growing or if I have to replace the rest.

We added a self-fertile apple tree... Delicious Yellows!

More peas and the new cucumbers are sprouting!

For my birthday my wife bought me some stacking planters!

I managed to get them up in between rain this past weekend.

Corn on the left, beans on the right... We have a mixture of Pole beans, bush beans and yellow wax beans.

Tomatoes are blossoming. About 7 of our 36 plants have blossoms on them!

Serrano pepper blossoms. 3 Blossoms on this plant and two on the Jalapeno plant...

Our peas are blooming too.

Here we're trying potatoes in Smart Pots. Need more coir mix. I ordered coir and more stackers last week. They are supposed to arrive on Tuesday.

So that's our garden this year. We're making adjustments as we go.

Had to replace some plants. Learned our lesson about leggy seedlings too. The soil was bad, so I tilled in amendments and then stacked a 6" raised bed on top of the amended soil.

In addition, we have watermelons, honeydews and cauliflower growing.

Here's a picture of the garden before I setup the smart pots and the stackers!

The berm in the back of the pictures was finally removed by the builder. Unfortunately when it went away, so did our butterfly garden that was growing. So we reseeded the butterfly garden now that the berm is gone. Hopefully it will catch up!

Questions, comments, etc. are welcome!

It's our first garden at our new home

Good job Qinx! Now. . . .what's fer supper?

Wow! A lot of work and love for sure! I love your discipline to get this all done! Your recipes will be delish for it!

Curious, what is the gride pattern for on the plants? Will you leave that there until the garden is done? Does it help in some way?

I LOVE how you put nice fencing on the outside of your compost bin to make it attractive to the yard! What a neat idea!

Thanks!

The squares are from Square Foot Gardening method. They will remain and I should add a few more so I can truly claim I'm doing square foot gardening. lol It's a more intense way of gardening/spacing plants instead of row gardening. Google "Square Foot Gardening" for more info. I think it took 262 blocks in total to make the spacing all equal around the beds. The blocks are 1 foot wide so they work nicely with the square foot gardening method.

The fencing around the compost pile was leftover plastic from the lattice I cut for the garden grids.


Square foot gardening by Mel Bartholomew - http://www.squarefootgardening.com/

This message was edited May 4, 2009 11:47 AM

This message was edited May 4, 2009 12:05 PM

Supper is probably KFC or a pizza... all that work and we'll do takeout.

We can't wait for everything to produce. Depending on how much we get, we will freeze, can and store whatever we have excess of. At least that's the plan as of now.

Oh yes, I remember now about reading about sq ft gardening by Eliot Coleman! Good methods. I've not had the time or funds to adequately lay my garden yet but I'm beginnging and I can envision it (LOL)...I'm going this time with the lasagna gardening by way of inspiration from this book: http://www.amazon.com/Lasagna-Gardening-Layering-Bountiful-Gardens/dp/0875969623/ref=pd_bbs_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241452059&sr=8-4

Thanks for sharing your garden progress! It is motivating!