Garden Weekend

This weekend we devoted ourselves to our new garden. The couple that owns the house that we will be renting are kind enough to let us come and start a garden while it's time for planting. We had our work cut out for us.

Here are some before shots from my phone:

Grass, everywhere.

Grass and weeds!

After we pulled most of the grass and weeds and then some more grass, it was time to till.

Blake pretty much handled this part.

I planned the layout and then took some pictures. I did other supportive things too, like bringing water and making comments on his manliness. Unfortunately, my plan isn't to scale and I didn't leave adequate room to draw the mounds that we planted squash and watermelon in, or the rows of big onions we planted off to the right side of the boxes. Next year, I'll get it right.

We are using the Square Foot Gardening method.

Here are some of the flowers I'll be taking care of. It's interesting to be moving into an established house with fully landscaped flowerbeds and lawn. Lets hope we can keep it up ;)

Not sure what kind of tree this is...

I *might* resort to using this photo for my photo challenge
day 4 - clouds. So don't look too hard if you're a part of that group ;)

We went out to dinner - a rare treat - and went home and hit the sack. We were beat! We only got half of the space tilled (which is only half of the garden that we're using). Blake got up early on Saturday and finished tilling and leveled it out some. He also had some garden dirt delivered and built some raised beds with the neighbors leftover boards and landscaping fabric (Score! We have awesome neighbors!). We were worried that all of that grass and those weeds would just come back, since most of it had already gone to seed. We figured we'd keep some weeds out by lining the bottom of the boxes and using new dirt. We'll see how effective it was in a few weeks!

I was productive at home while Blake was working.. but who takes pictures of vacuming, laundry and cleaning toilets ;). Once the dirt was delivered and boxes built, I showed up with the results of my plant buying trip that afternoon. Now the action really begins! We got most of it done on Saturday, but had to come back Sunday after church and plant the things that are outside of the boxes (corn, squash, melon and onions).

Lots of shoveling dirt, super dry dirt, which took forever to wet down.
That was the hardest part of it all, wetting and mixing the dirt!

First box planted! 8 little peppers and several tomatoes in this one.

The last plants to go in were the onions.
Walla Walla Sweets and red onions

A row of corn started, a row of corn in seeds, and in two weeks,
we'll plant another row of corn from seeds. That should space out the harvest.

All done! 

We planted:
Tomatoes - three varieties, hot peppers - three varieties, beans, sugar snap peas, artichoke, cauliflower, broccoli, okra, carrots - regular and rainbow, beats - golden and red, cucumbers, onions, celery, corn, butternut squash, acorn squash, watermelon, zucchini, yellow squash, oh, and cabbage.

We have one empty square in one box, not sure what will go there, and some empty squares in another box for spinach and lettuces. We'll wait to plant those until we've moved in, because once they start producing, you have to stay on top of them or it will bolt in no time flat.

We bought what we could find in starts, but had to plant some things in seeds. I hope they come up! I'll keep you posted ;)