I thought that building the garden bed was going to be the hard part but I was wrong!
First, we had to pull out all the old plants and weeds that were growing in the space we planned to put the bed. I’ll be the first to admit I did not work on that part. Cliff tore everything up and rototilled the space.
Here is what the yard looked like when we moved in
And here it is after Cliff tore it up
Here we have placed the bed where we want it
We decided to buy garden mix from this place. We used their calculator to figure out how much soil we would need. I was thinking we could just run to home depot and pick up a few bags of potting soil. Ha! We figured the garden bed would hold up to 4 cubic yards of soil. That is a lot of soil! We ended up putting about 2 yards of just filler soil and then 1 yard of the nice garden mix on top. Garden Mix is just 1/3 Pulverized Topsoil, 1/3 Compost Soil, 1/3 Manure Compost, and a pinch of sand for drainage.
We filled the truck 4 times!
Almost there!
Now for the fun part. I headed over to Knuppers nursery to pick up some plants. I thought I had a plan for what I wanted to buy. But when I got there I was overwhelmed with choices. Not to mention the prices!
Here is what I got:
4 perennials for cut flowers
2 San Marzano tomato plants
1 tomato plant for canning
1 cherry tomato plant
1 green pepper
1 sport pepper
1 jalapeno pepper
1 banana pepper
2 pickles
1 zucchini
1 celery
1 broccoli
1 cauliflower
2 pole beans
3 strawberries
1 popcorn- you are supposed to let the cobs dry out and use the kernels for popcorn. We will see about that.
1 pesto basil
1 sweet basil
1 lemon basil
1 cinnamon basil
1 chocolate mint
1 mojito mint
Price: $170. Eeeekkkkkkkk…. I better not kill them all.
I am fairly confident I can grow tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, pickles, beans and celery. The broccoli and cauliflower are a stretch and lets face it, if I get popcorn out of that plant it will be a miracle!
Figure out where you want your plants to go
Can we just talk for a minute about how anal my husband is? I laid everything out the way I thought it would work. Then I went to him and asked if he would like to see it before I started planting. He said no, just make sure it looks good. I pressed him to please look at it first cause I know how he is. Well, he did look at it and what do you know? He moved everything around. See where I have those trellis? He wanted them centered between the windows. Which to me was weird cause they were both getting pole beans so I thought they should be next to each other. But he cannot live with uncentered trellis. The horror! Not only did he need them centered between the windows but he had to have the middle of the trellis line up with the center of the siding. Do you see what I have to live with?
See how he moved those trellis?
One more look:
My way
His way
You will notice that in the “my way” pic the plants are still in the containers and in the “his way” pic they are planted. So, I guess we know who won that battle.
You may also be wondering what that trench is around the bed. Cliff is going to put pavers around the garden bed. Fancy, right?
So we planted the garden 1.5 weeks ago and look at that pepper already!! If only I liked peppers!
