Before and after.

For everything in between, see the flickr photo set on this project at http://www.flickr.com/photos/redcedar/sets/72157622296535899/.

Now isn’t that exciting? In just a few short days B. and I managed to landscape half our backyard and create a collection of richly-fed vegetable growing beds for next spring. Total project cost came to under $1050 including the garden bench and the perennial vines & plants – but not including the arbor which came from my mother-in-law’s previous garden. Best part of all is that this is probably the first time ever a project has turned out to look as good in real life as it did in my imagination.

So what did we do here?

1. To start off, I made the garden boxes. Probably didn’t need to start there, but they were easy to build over a couple evenings after work. These were constructed using 1×6 untreated cedar fencing planks that I bought off Craigslist for cheap, and Lee Valley hinges to hold them together which were not cheap. I probably should have used 2X6s but it’s easier to find untreated 1×6’s anyway when I need to replace them.
2. We were feeling a bit lazy about digging up the sod in our yard, so once we finished the boxes we spent a few hours covering the backyard with layers of newspaper, cardboard and weed fabric. Unfortunately the day I did this was a bit windy so I had to keep spraying the layers of paper with water to keep it from blowing away, and then had to hold the fabric down with scraps of wood so it wouldn’t blow up overnight.
3. The next day we got into the mulch – which I got a really good deal on from a co-worker whose brother has a mulch company. B. did most of this while I made breakfast and organized other things.
4. By the afternoon of this day, we had the boxes in place (and leveled with scraps of 2×4), and the arbor up and managed to make two runs out for additional supplies – the edging wood, the bench on the vines for the arbor – all of which we got on sale because we were purchasing at the end of the season.
5. On Friday, this guy brought me five yards of vegetable-gardening mix. He was super nice and the mix is gorgeous – compost, peat, sand and well-rotted mushroom manure. That afternoon, B. and I filled four of the boxes. Unfortunately I miscalculated the amount needed and we are about three yards short (we’ll wait until spring to fill the other boxes).
6. Yesterday, I nailed together pieces of lath to make my square-foot-gardening grids and stuck them in the boxes. Not only that, but I planted some garlic! (still awaiting an order or seed garlic from west coast seeds to finish my garlic planting).

That’s pretty much it until February when I start putting more stuff in the ground as per the growing charts – and we are *so* happy to have got this far in creating both a really productive vegetable growing space as well as a nice little “hangout corner” in our yard. I will be putting trellising up in the two boxes closest to the fence so I can vertically grown squashes and peas, and am further planning planting potato plants in burlap sacks which (I hope) will add to the growing/space-maximizing aesthetic.

After all this was done, I sat down with six sheets representing each 4×4 box and mapped out what all is going to go in there come spring. Which may sound ridiculously hyper-organized, but one of the problems I always have (and the reason I buy so many starts and don’t go from seed on up) is because I continually miss planting windows – so after choosing each of my varities, I am going to make an actual planting calendar with an attempt to stagger sowings so as to get continual crops of some things throughout the summer (like bush beans). Basically designing my own garden master-plan in an attempt to see what works and what doesn’t with this whole square-foot method. Only time will tell whether I’m satisfied gardening this way, but already I can say that breaking the garden out into squares and planning that way is a whole lot easier to conceptualize than rows.

I’ll be recording some of my choices here in the next little while as I sift through my broad categories and get down into varieties. Perhaps I’ll even try to post my grids here as examples of my neurotic organizing streak. In the meantime, I’m just glad the bones of the garden are in place to flesh out come late winter and spring.