Starting a New Vegetable Garden

We spent the day today started a new vegetable garden in our backyard. I wanted just a small garden in this spot, for starters. I started by following my own advice and graphed the garden out on a piece of paper first. Once I graphed out the size of it – - which turned out to be 12 foot by 15 foot . . I then listed out each of the vegetables that I wanted to plant in this garden.

My list:

1. Tomatoes
2. Cherry Tomatoes
3. Grape Tomatoes
4. Green Beans
5. Peas
6. Onions
7. Carrots
8. Broccoli
9. Cauliflower
10. Cucumbers
11. Lettuce
12. Various Herbs

Once I had that list – I researched each plant to determine the spacing needs for each plant. This way – I knew ahead of time how many plants I could put in a row, and how much space I would need. Some plants are crawlers (cucumbers) – - others are root plants that don’t need a lot of room (carrots, onions) – - others are climbers needing trellises or cages (tomatoes, beans, peas).

Armed with this knowledge – we set about the task of creating the bed, first. We chose a nice location in the yard that was sure to recieve a good 6-8 hours of direct sunlight during the day. We used steaks and string to mark off the exact area we needed and started digging the edge.

Once we had the edges defined, we tilled the ground about 12 inches deep. Turning up all the soild and grass. Luckily, we didn’t find any stones or rocks in the ground at all – - we found real excellent and rich sandy soil that would be perfect for our garden.

Once the area was tilled – - we removed the top 3 inches of soil from the area and replaced it with a compost mixture with rotten manure for a good fertilizer base.

The whole process of edging the area, digging it up, tilling it, removing the top 3 inches and replacing with compost took us approximately 4 hours to complete. We would have kept going, except the skies were warning us to pack it in and head inside. We have quite a doozy of a storm coming our way!

Tomorrow, weather providing – we will finish the bed off by edging it with the brick that we bought from our local garden center:

We decided to put an edge around the garden to keep a good separation of garden and grass – since our grass is very rich, thick and fast growing – we don’t want it growing into the garden!

I’ll post updates on our garden progress as time goes on.