Some wonderful gardeners from our church gave a class on how to make raised beds. Once Spencer and I had finished our re-landscaping, we started our own beds. First we built 4 boxes. We chose to use landscape timbers for estetic reasons. Then we laid cardboard (thank you diaper boxes) and newpaper down to kill the grass. Then we mixed equip parts vermiculite (it's much lighter than it looks), peat moss, and mushroom compost. We just used a 5 gallon bucket of each and mixed it on the tarp...Hailey helped. Then dumped the tarp into the box. We repeated until the boxes were full.
Later, I used eye-screws and twine to for the 12-inch grids. We also used 2x2 posts with eye-screws and twine to for lattice for our climbing plants. The next step was to plant the seeds. Almost everything we started from seeds. Hailey and Makenzie only made it through about 1 1/2 beds before they ran off and played. But they helped!
Isaiah was confined to the bouncer for this process. This dirt was too expensive to become his lunch! And there are the finished beds...full of seeds!
Here is the result of our labor!!! Almost all of our seeds have come up! The "hold-outs" are some of the herbs I planted in the farthest bed, but the seeds were from last year and may have gone bad. We bought 12 tomatoe plants, 8 pepper plants, and 2 zucchini plants at the local flea market for a whopping total of $20!!!! You can't beat that price!
Mmmm...I can already taste the fresh fruit and veggies!!!
Now I just have to figure out when to pick the stuff! Real food doesn't look like super-market stuff!
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