Our Not So Little Urban Gardening Experiment!

Justin: Stacey and I have tossed around the idea of putting a veggie garden together for quite a while so a couple weekends ago, and since I was on-call with nothing else to do but wait, we decided to delve head first into it. Again thank you everyone for the Lowe's gift cards over the years! Not only have they given us lively and lovely colors in and around our home, but recent bookshelves and now a very nice raised bed vegetable garden!

So our backyard is not very flat...It's not too bad, but we wanted the beds level so we had to dig out several yards of Carolina red clay and considering it was done with A shovel and A maul and it was 90 degrees, it took us a good while and was quite the effort. No, we didn't have any power equipment to dig with. We did however have the awesome Hitachi 18v drills and the circular saw that my father and father-in-law gave me a couple years ago. Anyway, three trips to Lowes, two days and several blisters later, TA-DA! A (roughly) 4x8 and a 4x4 bed. They are 4 landscape timbers deep, (15 or 16 timbers, I believe) which comes to roughly 15 inches deep and we're using about 10 inches of soil/compost/peat moss. We laid some weedscreen at the bottom and we had already dug well beneath the grass line. Hopefully that will keep us weed-free for quite a while.

We used bamboo stakes to define out 1'x1' plots.

What did we plant? A lot! We planted corn, red peppers, green peppers, carrots, red onions, lettuce, squash, green beans, broccoli, cucumbers and spinach! We also are starting an upside-down tomato plant that will hang on the plant hanger that you barely see on the left in the above photo.

Funny enough, our neighbor who had started a small cucumber and squash garden a while back, was watching us work. He and I had discussed renting a tiller to do various things around the yard several weeks ago and well, he went that afternoon and got one from his Grandfather. I told him as he was easily grinding up the ground that he was a cheater and that I'll be flipping him off for a while. His reply was that his wife had already told him that after seeing our raised beds, he'd be building some within the year.

As this post is a bit behind, we ALREADY have sproutings! I'll post those in the next day or so. Very exciting! Next project is a compost solution and an herb garden as paying so much for rosemary and cilantro simply ticks me off.

I'll also post some links to some sites that we used to reference and some others that just have some wonderful ideas regarding urban gardening in general.

Be well!