Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Raised bed veggie garden

I'm so excited about our new raised bed veggie garden. I did a bunch of research and ended up doing it the lazy (or do-what-you-can-with-kids) way. I found a website that recommends six layers of buildup (compost, fertilizer, straw, etc.) in a framed border. It sounded very good. I spent all day yesterday and half of today around town trying to find the right materials and fit them in my Subaru Forester. The green bean seeds we planted a few weeks ago were 6"-9" high already, so I was pretty eager to get them in the ground. After all the effort, I was outside at 8:30pm last night finishing up the garden, buying more top soil and compost today, and completed the project this evening. Then we put the eight green bean seedlings in the ground! I have no idea if it's bad to plant seedlings at 6pm, but I guess we'll see. I ended up with just the frame (pressure treated 2"x8" boards) and lots of top soil and compost. I intended to put down cardboard and wet newspaper, but I ended up putting the garden where a stone patio sort of thing was (the stones are now the border around the garden), so there were no weeds or anything else growing. I was impatient and decided to skip the cardboard/newspaper step. We'll see if that was a good decision or not in a few weeks.

Our green bean seedlings. I'm thinking about putting some seeds directly into the ground too, in case something goes wrong with the seedlings. You can never have too many green beans, right?

The finished garden with the green beans in place. I'm going to space the reddish stones evenly around the edge and fill in the rest of the bed with seeds in the near future. Just wanted to get those beans in the ground before they outgrew their little plastic snack cups. :) There's a little tomato plant in the pot in front and flowers in the garden on the left.

1 comment:

Julie said...

I think it was a good decision to skip the cardboard. You don't need it if you're ot trying to kill grass.

That raised bed looks awesome!!! I wish my garden was that pretty.