Alex and I will be the first to admit that our DIY skills are lacking when it comes to gardening. Plastering, plumbing, electrical, and woodworking don't scare us, but ask us to make selections in the outdoor center at a local nursery and our knees begin to quake. But there's only one way to fix that -- call in the experts! No, I'm kidding of course, you know that's not our style. In our home, the way to fix our green thumb deficiency is to talk to friends, family, nursery staff, read books, research, and try, try again.
Last year we made our first attempt at building a raised bed organic vegetable garden in our back yard. After reading All New Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew, we felt it was a simplified approach and might be easy enough for black thumbs like us to tackle. So under Lulu's watchful eye, we got to work by first pulling up a small section of bricks to make room for the 10x2 garden, followed by creating the new bed, preparing the soil, selecting the veggies to plant, and popping them in the ground. If you're interested in the whole project from the start, you can read all about last year's three part square foot garden series.
- First Steps - Selecting the Location
- Building the Garden Bed
- Preparing the Soil and Planting
All this hard work left us with a great foundation for our new vegetable plants. Last year we planted cabbage, Ichiban eggplant, spinach, sugar snap peas, kale, chives, lavender, beets, and spring onions.
We carefully cared for our new green friends all summer long, and truthfully were met with mixed results. The beets died a slow death, the sugar snap peas wilted before their big debut, and the spinach never showed up to the party. Oh, and what we thought was broccoli was actually cabbage, but we didn't know this and just kept waiting for the broccoli to show up. So by the time the black thumb crew realized it, we had even let the cabbage go to waste. Feel free to shake your head in disgust along with us at that one.
On the positive side, the chives and lavender flourished. And we even harvested four eggplants, a couple spring onions, and a good supply of chives and kale throughout the season. In our house, we consider that a modest success for year one.
And so that brings us to year two. Undeterred by a few flops in 2011 and armed with a year of experience under our tool belts, we set off to get ready for another year of organic square foot gardening. The bed had weathered a bit during the cold months. The white wash isn't as crisp and a few faint cracks in the wood are starting to show.
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