Sunday, May 3, 2015

A New Garden

My parents came over yesterday to help me start a garden in our backyard. My friend Helen and I had rented a community garden plot two summers ago, and I loved it. We were pretty successful with our plants--we had tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, potatoes, and even a watermelon. However, it was somewhat tough to get out there on a daily basis to water, so when D and I moved into a house with a backyard, I was excited to have my own garden.

Helen and I at our garden with bags and bags of harvested potatoes :)
I knew I wanted a raised garden bed (our soil isn't that great at drainage, so raising it helps, plus I thought it might help keep rabbits out), but that was all I knew. I looked up some options online, but I definitely wasn't set on anything. My parents brought a bunch of bricks with them that were from my grandpa's (on my dad's side) jewelry store that I had the option of using (free materials, woo!). I wasn't sure how using bricks would turn out, but I decided to go ahead and give it a try.

We started by going to Menards to buy a bunch of dirt. Since we were raising up the garden slightly (we decided to do about 4-5 inches above the ground), we would need a decent amount of dirt. We ended up getting 20 bags of black dirt (!) along with two bags of sand to mix in. I also picked out several vegetable plants to buy, and bought some packets of seeds.

Once we had all of the materials, putting the garden in went pretty quickly. The hardest part was digging up the grass where the garden would go, but even that wasn't too bad. Once the bricks and soil were in place, I planted all of my vegetables, and my mom planted a bunch of flower seeds in the front (I hope they grow!).

View of the garden from the garage.

Close up of the garden
There were several extra plants that wouldn't fit in the main part of the garden, so my dad decided to plant an "overflow garden." He thought it would be an interesting experiment to see if spending $30 on soil and putting the work into elevating the garden would improve the outcome of the plants. We will see. :)

Overflow garden--even if the plants grow well, it's just not as pretty as the main garden :)
Since I took most of yesterday off to get the garden in place, I have a lot of work to do today to study for finals! I have a statistics final tomorrow evening, and my robotics final on Wednesday evening. After that, another semester will officially be over. :) Have a great week, everyone!

4 comments:

  1. Good Luck on your finals!!!! Good luck with the gardening as well

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    1. Thank you! I think I'll need more of that luck for the finals than the gardening. :) :)

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  2. I would love to have a garden someday, but I really have no idea what Im doing. Good luck on your finals!

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  3. Your garden is going to be so nice! It's around this time of year when everyone starts posting pics of their gardens that I'm jealous I don't have a house! haha

    Good luck on your finals!

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