How Will My Garden Grow?

Adventures in Square Foot Gardening

Garden Components

Support Your Local Tomatoes (and Peppers!)

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Week 4 and it is time to add the supports for the tomato, zucchini  and pepper plants. These are tomato towers that we ordered through squarefootgardening.com ($39.99/each). They would have been really easy to make using conduit, rebar and netting, but I’ll admit to taking the easy way out and just having them delivered. (This is a spectacularly busy time at Soil and Water – what with Earth Month and all) It’s all set up below.

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This whole project took about 20 minutes for setting up and intall. Super easy and quick! Here’s the way it went…

First, the package:

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Components laid out:

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Now, assembly time! Position the curved pieces behind the bed to easily see where the rebar supports need to go. Hammer that rebar into the ground.

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You can see here how far into the ground we went:

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Next – slide the poles onto the rebar

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Then attach the tops and secure the netting. You can tie it on, but we used zip ties. We had them, they were convenient and easy! (can you see the convenient theme running through this project?)

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Final Product!

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Week 3 – Weeds and Water

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Week three and I don’t think I’ve killed anything yet (at least unintentionally). All plants are doing well and you can see how they’ve grown. We’ve had a ton of rain here this past week – as a matter of fact, Greg says that I did a great job of organizing the garden watering without actually doing any work!Garden-0178 …

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More Week 2 – Plants!

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Now we can plant! But first, we’ve got to decide what to include in the garden. I’d gone to Lowes and bought a bunch of seed packets several weeks ago and I brought those out to figure out the garden plan. Tomatoes and peppers would be purchased as plants to give them a fair head start. Here’s the plan (I even used fancy graph paper!):

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Plants and Seeds – Week 2

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Week 2 begins with a bit more growing medium added to each bed.  We didn’t feel that the beds were full enough after last week, so we added two bags of compost and one of vermiculite to each bed. (The organic compost came from Country Boys Nursery – $8.99/bag and the vermiculite from Lowes – $4.28/bag). I’d overestimated on the peat moss last week, so felt that the mix would be good with these additions.

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Setting up the Garden(s) – Week 1

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One Garden – Some Assembly Required

Sunday morning, ready to get it together! What is all of that?

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How will we do this?

OK – first decision made – I’m going to follow the Square Foot Gardening method as closely as possible.

This means that raised bed gardens will be the way to go. This eliminates having to till our clay soil, and ensures that the growing material will be ideal for vegetables. I’ll try to match the recommended mix for the growing material, which is 1/3 compost, 1/3 peat moss, and 1/3 coarse vermiculite. The compost should be from 5 different sources….

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