Starting a garden

In a departure from our usual sprawling, 25-foot-long and 10-foot-wide row garden, we've decided to try something new: Square Foot Gardening, AKA French Intensive Gardening.  Yesterday Mark and I built two 4'x4' wooden boxes out of 2x10 lumber.  We had no scrap lumber, so I bought four boards at Chris and Diana's lumber yard, and Chris cut them to 4-foot lengths for me. I also bought 12 laths.  One of which Mark stepped on and broke -- which reminds me that I need to go back to the lumberyard .  (making mental note)

I can't use my back yard right now, since the dogs have taken up residence there.  Someday we'll get them a kennel and pen them up. But for now, I want vegetables anyway!  So, I put the boxes along our driveway in front of our house.  They will get full sun after June 1, and until then the eastern box has shade until 11 a.m. and then they both have full sun.  The drainage is good, since it's right down our driveway.

First we put big sheets of cardboard underneath them to act as a weed barrier and natural mulch.  The cardboard was free, courtesy of the Dollar General dumpster and the 800+case truck we got at the store on Tuesday.  :)  I knew all that breaking down of boxes would come in handy someday!  We watered down the cardboard after layering it in about an inch thick.

Then we went out to the horse pens, and dug up two barrels full of composted horse manure. Another free source.  I guess the horses ought to be good for something!

We layered the manure over the cardboard, and watered everything in.  Then we mixed in a bale of peat moss and a couple of ginormous bags of potting soil we got at Sharon's garden shop (because we didn't plan ahead and had no good sources of soil), and watered all of that in.

We measured out square-foot increments, and nailed on a grid made of lath to mark my square-foot garden plots.  Then Hannah and I researched and mapped and plotted what we 

wanted to plant, based on what seeds and plants were available locally, and a few we ordered from Burpee.

We also got one patio tomato from Sharon so we could have an earlier harvest of tomatoes, and she gave us a leggy Big Boy tomato that she was going to toss, and I potted that, too.

We still have some seeds coming in the mail, and the trellises to build along the north sides of the boxes so we can train the squash, tomatoes, cucumbers and eggplant to climb.  More on that when it happens.

And because I can't resist flowers, I also potted everything in sight that I could lay my hands on inexpensively.  I ran out of pots, even after using the stash I've had in the garage for the past 15 years.  

In these two 4'x4' boxes, we have:

4 cucumber plants

4 yellow squash plants

2 eggplant plants

4 oregano plants

4 basil plants

1 jalapeno pepper

32 carrots

8 bibb lettuce

18 bush beans

32 radishes

9 spinach

3 bell pepper

4 tomatoes

4 dill plants

4 parsh

ley plants

8 marigolds (to look pretty and keep bugs away)

16 green onions

... and we still have a few empty boxes to plant radishes and lettuce at later intervals so we can rotate the crops and have a steady supply of the quicker-growing produce.

It's a work in progress, and I'll try to update at each stage.  (And thanks to Marcella and Ray at the NFP Board for the inspiration to do it this way!)