DIY Raised Vegetable Garden

As promised, here are the garden details...

This garden may be small, but  it will be more than enough for our family plus enough to share.  It really doesn't take much space to grow fresh food and I'm so glad we took the time to make this happen.  Gardening is so rewarding, especially when you grow your own food.  This fall we plan to add brackets and pvc pipes for creating a removable cold frame.  We want this garden to be active as many months out of the year as possible.  I'll be sure to share those plans when the time comes.  By the way, the stacked pots in the back left hand corner are filled with herbs - another great space saver.

There are so many tutorials out the there for raised beds.  We read a few and decided to come up with our own plan to fit our space.  The 12' boards were cut in half at the hardware store just so they would fit in the car to come home with us.  We pieced them together with scraps from other boards.  Basically everything is secured at the corners by screwing the boards into the posts.  The posts are hammered into the ground to secure the bed in place.

Whenever I have gardening related questions, I pull out Dad's old gardening bible, "Crocket's Victory Garden".  Have any of you heard of it?  It was published in the 70's long before the internet was available.    There is something nice about looking at a book rather than google searching sometimes.  Dad always planted the most beautiful vegetable gardens.  It makes me feel a little closer to him when I refer to his book and the simple gardening techniques are so easy to follow.  I prepared the recommended soil formula of equal parts peat moss, sand, and topsoil.  We also added cow manure as well as organic vegetable fertilizer.  I tilled it all together to mix it well.

1 - green beans

2 - cucumbers

3 - various peppers

4 - various tomatoes

5 - broccoli

6 - cauliflower

7 - brussels sprouts

8 - buttercrisp lettuce

9 red leaf lettuce

In order to get the best use of space, we planted the green beans (seed) in the back along with cucumbers (seed) which can climb if trained early.  Cucumbers can be really invasive, so we need to check them each day to make sure they are moving in the right direction.  Everything else is self explanatory.

Now all we have to do is watch it grow...