This year we decided that it was about time for us to really start to learn to garden. We have had some successes in the past with our garden, but feel that we needed to start paying some serious attention to our gardening skills. There are several things that prompted us to really start focusing on the garden:

1. We have the space for a garden
2. We like to eat food fresh from the garden because it tastes better
3. We know where the food came from and what was (“was not”, in our case) sprayed on it
4. We want to be more reliant on our own abilities to produce food
5. Its a good experience and atmosphere for the whole family
6. We feel we are better stewards of the earth and its resources by limiting the resources it takes to get the food to us

We did two things this year that I think has really paid off for us, we built some raised beds with good topsoil and we started our plants indoors instead of buying them at the nursery.

We built the sides of the beds from 2x12s with 4x4s for the corners . We located the boxes in the existing garden area. The boxes are four feet wide and ten feet long and there is space for twelve of them currently. We bought a dump truck full of topsoil to fill the boxes because our soil here is all clay. We felt that, overall, it would be best to get started with good soil instead of working for years to amend the clay to get the soil we wanted. This, so far, has been a great choice! The plants this year are better than we have ever had.

Plants From Seed

Starting the seeds inside has been very good for us too. I bought a florescent light fixture and two plant bulbs for it at the blue store. I then suspended the light above the table that we were going to use for the plants, and hooked the light to a timer. The timer was used so that we could get twelve hours of light to the plants when we still had snow outside.

We bought seeds and pots from the local seed store. We planted packman broccoli, watermelon, eggplant, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, bell peppers, anaheim chilies, serrano chilies, jalapeno peppers, artichokes, rutger tomatoes, big beef tomatoes, and italia roma tomatoes. We also planted some flower seeds for a new flower bed we were planning. The plants came up really well. It was very exciting to see them all grow and many times we were surprised at what actual plants looked like, we had never seen a broccoli or artichoke plant!

We didn’t lose any plants when we moved them to their new home outside in the new garden beds. We had a lot of leftover tomato plants and gave some to friends and planted some in the flower bed. Now that things have progressed during the year we have been thinking about our planting arrangement and will do it differently next year. Now that we know how some of the plants grow we will not plant the broccoli as close as we did, and we will probably space the tomatoes a little differently also. Overall, it has been a great garden and a great experience planting our plants from seed.