Thursday, April 21, 2011

Boxes in the Garden

It's almost done!!!

We decided to build boxes for our garden this year after reading so much about how it was better to grow that way. It increase yield and you use less space so you can plant more. We figured that instead of going out and renting a tiller like we usually do, we would recycle/upcycle some lumber we had laying around and build the boxes. Granted these are not the best looking boxes but they didn't cost me anything, (infact they saved me $60 for not needing the tiller,) but if I get a year or two out of them I will be happy.  I've been slowly working on building the boxes and getting them in place.


This is what I started out with this morning:
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The first box is already planted with seeds and my daughter's cabbage is planted as well. You can see one of the big boxes that was just set in the garden for placement.  Being in New England we have very rocky soil so there are piles of rock all around the outside of the garden. It's tough to tell but there is actually a ledge to the garden, it's down from the grass about 2-3". 

I spent all afternoon digging up dirt and filling boxes with it, compost and a couple of bags of organic soil mix.

This is almost done:
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The rain barrel we use to help water the plants. It's a long way from the house, ~200ft, to run a hose to water them but we will if needed. Right now after winter the barrel is about half full.  The long boxes are spaced out enough so that you can comfortably walk between them.

This shows what is planted, or planned to be planted and where:
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I still have the cucumber, yellow squash, zucchini, beans, eggplant and spinach to plant. The unknown plant in the front I think is garlic but I have no clue. We'll have to wait and find out later. The garden last year was actually another 2 feet wide and we didn't nearly have as much in it.  Here's to keeping  my fingers crossed that it does good.

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