RAISED BEDS LET THE GARDENING BEGIN

Now that the garden is FENCED IN, it's time to get the plants in the dirt.

Well, OK, half of them are planted.  We've got six raised beds in total for this first growing season...four 4'x4' squares and two 4'x8' rectangles.  I'm not going the square foot gardening route entirely, but I'm using it as a guideline, as a few of you so kindly suggested.  In other words, I'm not sticking to it religiously but instead using it to keep myself organized in the garden and still hopefully get a bit more stuff out of the smaller space.  This is, after all, my first attempt at large scale gardening.

So here is what I got planted last weekend
(many of these growing in town until they could get taken out there):

4x4 Raised Bed Square Foot Garden

In the first 4x4 square, I planted two Asian eggplants.  We've had great luck with the Ichiban we had in town, so we are hoping for some more this year.  Also put a Big Bertha bell pepper in the middle.  We'll probably leave them on the plant to turn red so we can roast them.  I used two of the squares to plant the leeks, ten of them in total; six in one square and four in the other, just to see how they do.  In another square I planted some carrot seeds.  Next, I planted six white icicle radishes that I found at the feed store (it's an heirloom variety) and next week, I'll be planting beet seeds.  For those, I'm going to use the seeds that sweet Melissa from Sky Minded & Ever Growing sent to me earlier in the year.  She sent some other seeds to me as well, but I'm saving those for the late Summer crop.  

4x8 Raised Bed Square Foot Garden

In one of the larger raised beds, I planted tomatoes and peppers and a surprise.  We have six tomatoes, all heirlooms.  Golden Jubilee (yellow), Cherokee Purple, two Homestead 24's, Marglobe, and Moby Grape.  I read that tomatoes can take up more than 1 square foot so I spaced them out sqaure foot style and gave them each 4 square feet each.  That left a spot in the middle and two spaces on the ends of two square feet each.  I put a Poblano pepper on one of those ends, and a TAM Jalapeño pepper on the other.  In the middle, I put a Tomatillo plant.  I started growing it in town and it already has two tomatillo husks puffed up. I've got to work on my trellis next in case they get out of control in a month or two.

I was hoping to get Melissa's "Yellow Taxi" seeds sprouted in time for them to be our yellow tomato, but I ran out of sprouting time with all the other stuff I was doing earlier earlier in the year.  I will however, do that for the Fall garden since we are lucky here to have a 2nd growing season in the Fall. 

4x4 Raised Bed Square Foot Herb Garden

And lastly, I got the Herb bed finished.  I planted them, as best I could, from highest growing in back to lowest in front (this picture is taken from the side).  Many herbs can be tall but if you keep harvesting them, you can keep them shorter, so I tried to take that into account as well.  There are sixteen herbs total, just planting one per square foot.  Again, some can be planted with more than one to a square, but I decided to just use the square foot plan as my organizing method to plant and keep them separated.

We've told 2nd Family that they are welcome to help themselves to fresh herbs any time they need them since we aren't there for a few days at a time.  They do, after all, supply us with fresh eggs most of the year, fresh herbs are the least we can do.

So there you have it, half of our total veggie square footage is spoken for.  We have a total of 128 square feet, and this is using 64 square feet.  I'm planning the other three beds this week.  It will involve squashes, beans, okra and other things. Of course, I want to grow it all, but I'll keep it manageable for this first time around and see what happens.

Fingers crossed!
Now let's get growing!