Backyard Gardening Fun: Part 1

Mike's house came with six custom-built raised garden beds, courtesy of the previous owners. We decided that since the beds were just sitting there ready to use, we'd try our hand at gardening. Our first attempt last year was a reasonable success. We planted a ton of stuff but didn't really have any clue as to what we were doing. Some of it failed (like beets and carrots) because we over sowed seeds. Some of it succeeded (we had roughly a 927 cucumbers). And over half of it was decimated by bunnies and groundhogs who discovered a fantastic and totally free salad bar in a sleepy little suburb of Framingham.

So for this year, Mike and I took our accumulated knowledge from our first attempt and made a plan to become smarter gardeners.

APRIL 2018
First on the plan, was to overhaul the raised beds. The existing ones were very nice and custom, but also rotting away. The space between the beds was also way too narrow to walk through, which was annoying when you're trying to weed or harvest.

We measured everything and ordered some pre-fab snap-together cedar beds off the internet. These are from Greene's Fence and they're pretty easy to throw together. No power tools required. The hardest part was dismantling the old beds and shoveling all the dirt into the new beds. Actually that might have been the hardest part of this entire project.

The new beds are awesome. They're taller, allowing for deeper planting. And they're a tad more narrow, which means we can now move freely between the beds to care for the garden.

Wait, no. The number one hardest part was security. Since our biggest frustration was animals eating everything last year, this year we decided to install some fencing to keep them all out. Couple of wooden stakes + some plastic mesh + a staple gun = security. (we put the mesh in later after planting). We also added two ladders for the cucumbers and zucchini to attach to, since they like to creep and crawl.

BTW I made friends with a frog. He expressed some anxiety about the renovations but assured him that his home was just getting an upgrade.

Now for more planning. Last year was just a hot mess of throwing plants and seeds into the beds at random. Which resulted in cucumbers strangling peppers and beans overtaking beets. So I knocked out a quick blueprint, because I like organization.

And we took that blueprint to the garden center when we did our shopping.

All the peppers will go in this one box.

Cukes and zukes will go here under the ladders for climbing.

Tomatoes here. Big beef and one weirdo variety called Fletcher (bottom of screen).

A cherry tomato goes here. It's the Sun Sugar variety.

Here's the herbs and strawberries. Cilantro, chives, parsley, and scallions. Then a row of strawberries. We've never tried strawberries, so they will be interesting to try growing. I also did some mulch replacement.

With everything mapped out, we began putting the plants into their new homes.

Pepper Alley is complete. It begins with red, orange, and green bellpeppers at the bottom. Then jalepeno and cayenne peppers. Then Scotch Bonnets, Trinidad Scorpions, and Ghost Peppers at the top.