Square Foot Garden 040310

So I am not sure if you remember last year that we tried to grow peppers, but we weren't very successful. We didn't realize we were actually supposed to thin it out so much, well we didn't know why we were supposed to so we didn't do it. So our peppers were only about 1 1/2 inches long! lol Kevin's mom said we could make stuffed pepper appetizers! ROFL

Well even with out not so successful crop last year we decided to try it again and go all out. We are eating a ton more veggies so we decided to actually do a whole garden. But our yard is sooooooo small we knew a regular garden was just NOT going to work. So I have a friend from SparkPeople, Alicia, that told me about Square Foot Gardening. Here is a quick explaination of what it is. You build a box (typically 4 x 4 but anything in one food increments) and then create your own soil for your veggies to grow in. Depending on the recommended spacing you can put anywhere from 1 to 16 plants per square foot. And instead of putting a seed every 3 inches and then pulling them out to one per every 12 you just put in what you actually want to grow! lol The concept is you do not need to waste seeds AND you don't need ALL of your carrots to produce at the same time. So instead you just rotate your growing. If you know you eat 16 carrots in two weeks then you plant the 16 carrots this week and then two weeks later you plant 16 more carrots, that way every two weeks you have a new crop of carrots ready to be harvested! Also you don't need to have 3 feet in between rows (that is so you can walk between them, but what a waste of space!) If you just do it in squares you just reach in and don't need 3 feet between them, which means you have the same size garden in only 20% of the space. All of these things made it a perfect solution for us.

So on Thursday night we bought all of the supplies we needed (the plywood didn't fit in the trunk of the car so Amanda and Devin took their truck up and met us there on Friday--THANKS GUYS!!!).

Saturday after we put the kitty to sleep we kept ourselves occupied by building our box. Kevin and I worked together actually pretty good this time. There was only two problems, Kevin stripped the screws twice and one time it was only 1/2 way in when it got stripped. So we had a little "discussion" about that! lol I'll tell you the second problem in a little bit...lol

This is the bottom of the box...the plywood piece.

While we were working a ladybug landed on me. I gave her to Tye and he held her for probably 10-15 mins. He thought that was pretty cool and maybe she will come back often to visit our garden and protect it a little bit! :-)

Still working on the bottom of the box

The finished product! Way to go team!!! lol So the box is done. Now to fill it.

First we took a break and went to lunch at Red Lobster and went on the hunt for some vermiculite. Hardly any place sells it and if they do it is almost an arm and a leg! lol But we did go to a local nursery (well two of them, one guy gave us what he had for free, about 1 cubic foot and we needed 4 cubic feet), and bought the vermiculite, 3 bell pepper plants and some radish and lettuce seeds.

We came home and mixed the compost (cow poop and mushroom poop as the boys called it), vermiculite and peat moss. We got it put in the box and Kevin was starting to put the stuff away and I said, "OH CRAP!!!!!" He came a running and I said, "we forgot to drill holes in the bottom of the box for the water to drain out!" (That was our second problem of the day! lol) So we dumped the soil out and drilled the holes and then put it back in.

Then we added the laths for our square foot grids. Kevin was actually being quite the handy man this time!

Here is the final, final, final box and soil all done. Now to put the stuff in it Monday night for Family Home Evening. :-) We are pretty excited about it!!!

Oh and here is a video of another way Tye kept himself occupied! lol Enjoy!

I will post more pictures very soon!