Raised bed gardening

This year we decided to build a raised bed garden and grow some of our own vegetables. It's a nice idea to be able to grow your own food. You can choose to grown things organically as we are doing, you know where the food came from, and its fresh.

This is a picture of the beds after we built them and filled them with soil. You can see the rows at the end of one of the beds where we planted the first seeds for Brussels sprouts and peas.

After building the beds

After the garden started coming up we put up a short wire fence to keep small animals like rabbits out of the garden.

Garden starting

August, 2013

zucchini

So far we've gotten several zucchini out of the garden, along with a few handfuls of peas. We've made a couple of batches of zucchini muffins so far. There are some tomatoes growing and turning from green to red and a few peppers. The carrots and beets are growing well.

Early in the year some Japanese and Flea beetles were eating a lot of holes in the leaves on the broccoli and Brussels sprouts and a lot of leaves on the carrots. We squished most of the Japanese beetles and sprayed some soapy water to try to slow the Flea beetles down. By the end of July the beetles were gone, but that could have been due to their natural life cycle. The broccoli, carrots, and Brussels sprouts appear to have recovered quite a bit.

Next year

The garden grew pretty well this year but it is still relatively early, we haven't seen how the beets, carrots, broccoli or Brussels sprouts have turned out. The leaves on the beets and carrots are quite large so I'm hoping they will be large when we harvest them.

Next year I think we will try to spray the Flea beetles sooner and more consistently, as well as enrich the soil in the second garden bed. The soil in the second bed was quite compacted and was drying out much quicker than the first bed.

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Chris M.

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