The last couple of years with my Pawpaw's passing and life changing we haven't had a garden and we have missed it! This year we are trying a technique called Square Foot Gardening. It is basically raised bed gardening. My Mom has ten boxes at her house. My sister in law, Michelle, has three boxes plus two other raised beds at the lakehouse. I wasn't confident our backyard got enough sun, so our solution was to do some "mini" boxes for us to "experiment with. Our little boxes are 2 ft by 2 ft instead of the regular 4 ft by 4 ft.
Keith cut our boxes and Carli and I got to work!
First we put down some newspaper and wet it down to act as a weed barrier. Then we spread out our food compost. Yes, we actually did some composting! We used the bokashi fermentor method which worked out well! We covered our compost with some old potting soil.
Next we mixed our soil. It was 1/3 Vermiculite, 1/3 Peat Moss and 1/3 Compost (AKA Chicken poop). Carli worked really hard at the mixing part!
After we got it mixed up, Carli used her hand shovel to put it in our boxes...I finally helped since it was going to take awhile doing one little scoop at a time!
We did this all in about 45 minutes on a Saturday night. Here are our three boxes ready for planting!
Sunday after church it was time to plant!! Carli really liked this part. First we used some colorful duct tape folded in half to mark off our "square foots." Then we decided which vegetable to plant in what square foot. I think this box had okra and zucchini.
We even planted some green bean and pea seeds to grow!
Last but not least, it was time to water our little garden! Carli watered each plant very carefully, until she got to the end and the squash got jipped.
We check our garden every day! I hope the dogs stay out of it! Grammy's garden is coming a long too...just maybe we will get to each some very yummy home grown veggies this year! **We are using the book Square Foot Gardening and they have a website too: http://www.squarefootgardening.com/
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