Beginning of the Vegetable Garden

As indicated in the previous post, the raised bed with lots of good dirt was installed on May 21 by Liberty Urban Agriculture, a young husband (youth minister) and wife team doing this work as a second income.  It went into the space in the side yard we had left when doing the landscape remodeling.

 

Raised bed immediately after installation

The dirt was mostly bulk compost from the City of Plano, but also included lots of bags of commercial dirt from Home Depot.

The end result was a very loose, friable soil which supposedly will not need any additional fertilizer for the first set of plants.

All in all, they did a great job and the work was completed just in time to avoid the almost non-stop rains we had at the end of May...six inches of rain over about 10 days.  The bed is definitely well watered!  However, since it is raised, it seems to drain well.

I have spent a large amount of time figuring out what to grow and where.  Two major things had been decided even early on.

• We would be using the square foot gardening method,  although I ended up modifying this a little bit.  This method was popularized by Mel Bartholomew in a 1981 book which the Frog got back in the 1980's.  When I began looking at this in detail over the past few months I also got the very recent second edition.  I am very glad I did, since it is significantly different than the first edition.   The two cover somewhat different material, so complement each other.

• The other major decision was that we would start with a fall garden (i.e. planting in the summer to harvest in the fall) instead of planting in the spring to harvest in the summer.  I did not want to be forced to put the garden together at the same time I was teaching my last semester and moving out of my office.  Although it is a bit tricky with regards to planning what to plant when and may also present some challenges in finding plants to transplant, that was definitely the right decision.  Some books also point out that there are actually some advantages to the fall garden.  The soil is warmer so the seeds germinate faster and plants such as lettuce that tend to bolt in hot weather will have longer to produce as the weather becomes cooler in the fall.  We will see.

It initially seemed somewhat overwhelming to determine when and how to plant everything.  I nosed around on the web and found several planning programs that could help.  I decided to go with GrowVeg.  I can drag and drop the various plants into a footprint for the garden.  The program already has information about how many plants can be put into each square (or squares) in the garden if using the square foot gardening method.  It has been fun to play with and has greatly aided the process.

Here is the tentative plan we came up with for this year's garden.  The emphasis was on easy to grow things that we know we will use.  (The numbers in each square are the number of plants in that square foot.) 

This link has our plan, the list of plants/seeds and the schedule for planting.  I will update the notes on the right side of the plant list as things are planted or other things happen, so the information at that link should remain current.

Although the GrowVeg program provides suggestions for the planting schedule, I have primarily been using information from North Haven Gardens in Dallas.  Here is their list of planting dates, highlighted for those plants we plan to put into our garden.

One of the central tenets of the square foot gardening approach is allowing the plants to grow up so they take less space.  Our plan will require two 4-foot long trellises along the back (north) side, one at each end.  One will be for the tomatoes.  The other will be for the pole beans and zucchini.  We have the materials for the trellises and will work on the construction in the next few weeks.

Cantaloupe can also be grown on trellises (with extra support for the melons), but I decided against that.  Instead, the cantaloupe will be in the 3x3 space in the southeast corner rather than a 1x2 space along the back.  It may end up draping outside of the garden if it gets too big.

June 6 was D-Day for the garden.  We had already laid out a grid with screw eyes and nylon string.  We planted pepper plants, marigold plants and the cantaloupe seeds.  It isn't much for those people who do a lot of gardening, but we were excited.

Garden after first day (June 6) of planting--two squares of marigolds, five squares of pepper plants, and cantaloupe seeds planted.  Lots more will be added in the coming weeks.

We have all of the material for the trellises and will work on those in preparation for planting of the tomatoes about July 1.  Stay tuned.