Heights Eats

Our square foot garden was not quite as successful as we had hoped. One of our boxes is about 80% dead. But we are not going to give up — we’ve already decided on a few changes for next year.

One of the biggest problems we faced was lack of sun light, so we’re going to move the whole operation to our front yard — against the advice of our neighbor. Our front yard gets significantly more sunlight than the back yard, but we will have problems getting the hose to the garden. We only have one water outlet on the exterior of our home, and it is towards the back yard. Lesson learned: full sun, really does mean full sun.

Another big problem was the construction of our trellises. We opted to use bamboo stuck in the ground instead of the pvc pipe and rebar construction method suggested in the book. About midway through July our tomato plants got … continue reading

In the month of May we harvested some lettuce and around 5 strawberries. But a lot of growth has been taking place. Nearly all of the seedlings are in except cucumbers and a few straggling peppers. The trellises are also up.

We got a shipment of sweet potato plants this month that I had forgotten that I ordered awhile ago. I made room for them in the garden by adding them where some strawberry plants did not look like they were doing too well.

Soon the first batch of radishes and carrots should be ready. The radishes are looking good, but the carrots are growing more slowly.

These two boxes are on cement and are fairing OK (since the foliage has come in on the trees they’re not getting quite as much sun as before):

This one is on grass and I think is getting a lot more sun.

At this point in some of the squares it is hard to do … continue reading

We’ve taken up a new hobby — gardening! This year we’ve planted a vegetable garden in our back yard. Because our yard is small and sunshine is not plentiful we went with the Square Foot Garden technique. We’ve got three raised beds, each with sixteen squares. Two of our beds are on concrete and one is on grass.

After spending much of the early months of the year looking through vegetable seed catalogs we settled on heirloom seeds from Bakers Creek and Seed Savers. We’re going to attempt to grow:

a variety of lettuces
onions
carrots
red and yellow beets
a variety of tomatoes
a variety of peppers
peas & beans
cucumbers
strawberries
watermelon

So far we’ve got the lettuce, strawberry plants and sugar peas planted. The tomatoes an peppers are still inside under the grow light.

We’re optimistic about this garden as we’ve never put this much thought into the process. In previous years we’ve … continue reading

The Garden Project — Lessons Learned

Garden Project — May Update

Our Garden Project — April