Vegetable Garden

I didn't think I'd get around to it this year, but somehow I managed to get a bed ready for our spring vegetable garden.  There was already a pretty large flowerbed in the back of the yard when we moved in. It had three bushes in it, all of which died during the summer drought, and a lot of weeds.

After clearing out the weeds and mulch, I ran a soaker hose across the bed, securing it in place with garden staples. For now we have the garden hose running across the yard and set up on a timer. Eventually we'd like to dig a trench from the faucet to the garden bed and lay some pvc pipe, so we don't have a hose to move every time we mow.

Ideally I would like to move it away from the fence about a foot so there's room to walk behind it, and square out the front edges, but that will have to wait until next year...or never. I'm not sure I want to do that much digging.

I'm trying to do better at square foot gardening this year, so I can maximize the space. To help divide the bed, I staked out a 12" x 12" grid and marked it off with twine. I pulled an old laundry drying rack out of the donate box, and used a miter saw to cut it up into a bunch of little pieces, which I used for the stakes. It looked a little something like this before I chopped it up.

Source

Our next door neighbor has bamboo, which makes its way under our fence and grows up in the corner of our yard. Zach chopped it all down so we could use it to make bamboo teepees for our climbing plants. I used hand pruners to cut all the smaller branches and leaves off, then stuck a few pieces in each plot and tied them together with twine. Zach also built three wire trellises using garden fencing and scrap wood.

I also started some seeds indoors, for tomatoes, basil, broccoli, and peppers. We've got a pretty fancy indoor green house- a shop light hung across two closet rods.