Building the Garden Beds

In my last garden update I realize that I hadn't talked about how we built the garden beds and what we initially planted inside of them.

The easiest way to do this is to buy fencing posts. You can find these at your local hardware store for about 1.50-ish each. They come in 6 or 8 feet long (ours only came in 6) and we needed 3 per bed. We now have 4 beds that are 6x3 and 2 beds that are 3x3.

We also bought a piece of 2x4 for the corner braces on each garden bed. Cut to about 6 inches each (the height of the fencing board) we could get 8 corner pieces on a 4ft board.

To construct the beds, each end is attached to the 2x4 that acts as the corner brace. Once the beds have been built we laid down a layer of cardboard in order to help kill the grass below. To speed up the process we gave them a good soaking down. This would've been done the previous fall with new beds but I'm behind on setting up the garden.

This is Fred who was inside the soil we transplanted

We let the cardboard lay out overnight (several nights as the weather decided to snow) and then went to fill them with soil. We use a 33/33/33 mix of peat moss/cotton burr compost/organic garden soil.

After the soil is added and mixed we put in stakes that will hold sticky sheets in order to catch aphids and other little buggies that we don't want in our garden.

After adding the stakes it was time to measure out the square foot beds. These will (obviously) be 1x1 in diameter in order to use the square foot gardening method. To do this, I measured out every 12 inches while the fiance started staple gunning twine. We made good timing on this by each working on opposite sides and passing the twine and staple gun back and forth. 

Make sure the twine is pulled tight and for an added measure tie a couple of knots at the end of each twine.

Once they were finished we planted two rows of peas, several boxes of carrots, lastly some spinach and lettuce.

Last but not least is a little bit of water!

 Excuse the messy backyard. All six garden beds with the added composts behind them. We'll be adding a soaker hose watering system soon. Thankfully its becoming Tornado season here in the South so we should be getting a lot of rain soon. We'll be setting up rain barrels any day now!