Gardening Edit: Building Garden Beds

Gardening Edit: Building Garden Beds. We have been so busy planning and building and filling beds in our backyard! We bought a third garden bed and an archway trellis to fit between them all. We also decided to have some regular beds in ground, and that took some prep work to get it (hopefully) ready. It took awhile to get to the beds due to life and weather, but we finally started on them this weekend and I am so ready for our plants to start sprouting!

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I also potted up some of my veggies into this four inch soil block. It wasn’t difficult, but it used a lot of soil! I used the recipe from Eliot Coleman’s book. I kind of guessed at the amounts since I don’t quite understand the measurements used. They’ve been in the larger blocks for a couple of weeks and the cucumber plant already has buds, I’m not sure if I should pinch those yet. I started hardening them off last week and, I had kept them outside overnight for a couple of nights, but we had a frost warning on the night I decided to bring them in. I’m so glad I did that! Sometimes I forget to check the weather.

This weekend we decided to put together the third garden bed and trellises. Since we bought the trellises and beds from different companies, Ryan had to drill extra holes to support the trellises since the patterns didn’t match up, but since he is so handy, it was super simple – for him. While he was doing that, I put soil on the garden beds that I had aerated with the broadfork yesterday. Walmart had garden soil on sale so we stocked up since we don’t have any compost to use. I piled about three inches on the 30 inch wide beds and evened it all out. I made four beds roughly ten feet long, with the end two being about 8 feet. I had our daughter help put seeds in the ground with me, she had a great time. I’m still deciding what to put in the outer two beds, but in the middle two we have:

• Sugar Snap Peas
• Jacob’s Cattle Beans
• Pinto Beans
• Black Beans
• Sugar baby watermelon
• Honey Dew Melon

I’m thinking of making the outer two beds potatoes and butternut squash. Once these seeds were all in the ground it started pouring down rain! We had set up a little california beach tent in our yard for our girl and we all ran into the tent, but it was too small and loud so we ran inside for a short break and nap.

What I had ended up doing was pickling cucumbers along the one trellis, slicing cucumbers along two and I tried to have a lemon squash up the fourth. I put tomatoes in the large square garden bed, but ended up putting those in the ground. I put what I thought was banana peppers along the thin garden bed, turned out they were green bell peppers! A bit of a let down since I was really looking forward to banana peppers and pickling them.

Full disclosure, I actually wrote the last paragraph at the end of September. So in case you are curious about me working on finishing things – here you go haha!

To read my first year lessons learned – read here

Until next time!