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Our adventure in gardening started a while back when we first cleared a portion of the woods behind our house. We had a general overview of what we wanted to do with our new space but like most things it was easier said than done. We had succeeded in pushing the woods back but we had mass quantity sticks, rocks, roots, and not good topsoil in its place.
The next investment was a tractor; which has come in handy in so many ways. However to farm with a tractor you need implements and those cost money. So no rows of veggies in our backyard for a while, but we’ll get there.
Thus the need for raised garden beds
The only question then was how to build them. Pinterest is literally full of raised garden bed ideas. Metal, wood, pallets, mobile metal trough looking ones, square, oval, circle, rectangle… you get the idea. Well wood works up pretty quick but then you have to be careful not to get treated ones and nontreated ones rot. So now we’re talking metal. After lots of looking I found two different ones we could afford; there were some really nice ones if I wanted to break the bank. It came down to the fact that we needed them done over the weekend. Amazon could have them at the house Saturday and Lowes on Monday so Amazon for the win this time.
And poof there were garden beds…
If only it were that easy. Can we say lots, lots of little screws and nuts. The two kiddos made it almost through the completion of one bed. Then it was milk and nap time before we drove everyone insane. However my husband persevered and we had empty raised beds!
Now what do I put in them???
My husband took courses on sustainable agriculture but that only taught how to grow a garden in the dirt with a tractor and implements. Really helpful stuff when we arrive at that point. I watched my Daddy and my Granpa work in their gardens but I was never out there from start to finish. Can we say, “Things I wish I could go back and do for $1,000”. So it was Pinterest for the win! Pinterest is amazing if you have time to sort through it all. I’m the queen of pin it and look later, only to discover the link doesn’t work! Or the link works but it takes you to something other than what you wanted. So I am a firm believer in credit where credit is due. You can hop over to Cherrisse in Chicago and see her entire post if you’d like.
So we went with rocks, wire, paper bags, straw, eggshells, and topsoil.
All of those things were currently on our property and didn’t require buying anything else. Now word to the wise when using things currently on your property; if they have sat for a while be careful opening them. My husband had purchased rocks for a project at our prior house; multiple years ago. Needless to say, they had been sitting for a while. So in moving them I discovered ants first; no big surprise there. We let those sit until the ants had moved on. However in the next bag was a live skink; I learned the hard way last summer that those little suckers bite! And hard at that! Then came the black widow spider. And if that wasn’t enough, when I moved the last bag there was a snake skin on top of the next bag… so yeah that was the last bag that got moved. Snakes don’t bother me that much but we have copperheads in the shed so I didn’t want to run in to the owner of that skin if I could help it.
We decided to go with the wire option instead of weed barrier because we have a mole/vole tunneling through our chicken area and didn’t want him finding better things to eat in my garden. We had bought straw to throw down in the chicken area during our wet winter so there was plenty of that leftover to put in the beds. Lastly came compost and topsoil. Topsoil was easy and we had our local feed store bring us a truckload out. A compost bin is on my to do list; so I threw the eggshells I had collected for the compost bin in the beds, said a prayer, and hoped for the best.
Now came lots of hauling, cutting up stuff, and shoveling in dirt
Ta-Dah we have two completed raised garden beds!
And it happened all in one Sunday, with only me getting sunburnt and no screaming babies involved! I call that a win.
If only we had two more…
The end game with our mini farm is to be self sustainable. We are a long way from that goal but we have succeeded in not buying eggs since our chickens started laying over two years ago. From the beginning planning stages I tried to think of what we would get the most use from. I narrowed it down to: green beans, corn, tomatoes, potatoes, onions, carrots, and garlic. Potatoes need space and mounds. Carrots, garlic, and onions are not crops that can be planted in the spring. So that left me with corn, beans, and tomatoes. Corn takes up a lot of space; so I decided one bed would be dedicated to corn. Then originally I was going to fill the second bed with beans and two tomato plants at the end. However a sweet friend brought us some green pepper transplants… so my tomatoes are either going to get a hanging pot or a separate planter. But that’s a decision and a post for another day.
Throwing caution to the wind and letting my 3 yr old help plant
I had already put the transplant peppers in the one bed and two planters. That left corn and beans. My daughter loves being outside. So outside during brother’s nap time we went to get the garden going. She did a really good job of listening… for the most part. However she insisted on using her trowel and could not be talked out of it. Believe you me I tried. The corn worked out just fine because they needed to be a little deeper anyway. My poor beans not so much. However they got planted and maybe they’ll survive the journey to the top of the dirt. However if not, Mama went back outside and planted slightly farther in another row of beans down each side. So I may end up with lots of thinning to do but at least some of the beans are not set up for failure.
Now with a hope and a prayer we will have something grow…
Stay tuned and hopefully later this summer I’ll have a post where we get to can these green beans and corn we planted!