Wednesday, June 08, 2011

A New Addiction

Yes, we are addicted....to the Square Foot Gardening method, that is.  And it all came about so innocently!  This winter we were at our local library, and Willie checked out a couple of books on gardening, one of them being, The Square Foot Gardener, by Mel Bartholomew.  The more he read, the more excited he became....it all made so much sense, especially, since this is our first foray into gardening in years (let's NOT count them, okay?), and the idea of a tilling up a large section of our yard to put in rows and rows of produce just wasn't all that appealing.  And theeen, we read that Mr. Bartholomew had a newer version of his book out which eliminated ALL tilling?  Hmmm....yup, you guessed it....we headed over to our closest bookstore and nabbed us a copy.  (Actually, we purchased it....that honesty thing, you know.)

First, the boxes had to be constructed...that was Mr. Man's job...
We started out with three, but decided we really wanted to be able to have a little more variety and even some fresh produce to freeze for soups and such later in the year so we ended up going with six.

Then it was on to deciding where we wanted the garden.....
Once all the boxes were in place, it was time to mix up "Mel's Mix", a combination of peat moss, vermiculite and several different kinds of compost.  THAT was a chore....at least it was until we decided to only do half of a "batch" at a time. 

And now the planting has commenced!  Strawberries were the first things to go in, quickly followed by lettuce, spinach and chard.  Oh, and those luscious spring peas!

One of the neat things about this type of gardening, is that you can customize it to suit your needs.  We decided that we didn't want to have to make cold weather frames for all our boxes, so we made sure that the additional two boxes had only frost-hardy plants in them.  Soooo cool!
And our more delicate plantings were nicely protected from that last frost!  Now it's on to more planting, and the best part.....HARVESTING!!

Check back for reports on our progress with both the garden and the bees....until then, face your challenges, embrace your adventures and cherish your blessings!

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