How does your garden grow?

I spotted my first artichoke of this season! Now if I can just keep the bugs off of it I might get to eat it. :)This year I have not gotten the garden together quite as quickly as I would have wished. I got sick during my normal planting weeks and then took off on a two week vacation. Luckily, my friend Samara has been a great help with the weeding and planting. As of right now we have planted red and green bell peppers, jalapeno peppers, red and yellow onions, 1 zucchini plant, 1 yellow squash, 4 cucumber plants, 4 tomato plants, 2 types of watermelon, blackberries, blueberries, and strawberries. I still have my plum, pear, apple, and lemon trees. I would like to plant beets, snap peas and green beans, carrots, and pumpkin.

My Garden

When we moved into this house it already had a garden. :) I didn't have to figure out where I would put one, someone had already done that for me. It had pretty good bones to it also. They had placed a water spigot in the garden.

My sweet hubs rototilling for me. The ground was so hard. We rented a rototiller for about 25 bucks and it was worth every penny.
Last year I simply planted straight into the ground. No raised boxes. No mulch. No fertilizer.

Three times I cleared/had people help me clear my garden of weeds. I grew tomatoes, zucchini, beets, tried pumpkin, corn, carrots, snap peas, strawberries, etc. But then I got pregnant and as I got bigger so did the weeds. Below are a few more pics from last years garden attempt.

rows, rows, rows

Strawberries and Artichoke.

Before the weeds came-The last beautiful shot of my gardening attempt last year. I had put up a picket fence to help my 3 year old daughter know where she could walk without tromping on plants.

Now fast forward to 2010:

Crabgrass

I can grow weeds like no one else.

After weeding. So much better. But I had a plan this year. I tried to think about this garden in terms of years and not just this year. So I spent a few dollars. I pulled all my weeds. Then I asked my gardener to till and amend the soil. Then I laid weed blocker cloth over the entire garden. I bought a roll at Costco for about 30 dollars and covered my entire garden with one roll. I did have to buy more fabric staples.


After laying down the weed blocker, my husband helped me to build raised bed boxes. Now, my garden dollars were starting to add up. So instead of building the boxes completely I only built them halfway up this year. However, I built them so that I could continue to add on in future years. Notice the 4x4 posts that stick up above the frames of the boxes. I used redwood for my boxes. The posts also go 4 inches into the ground to help anchor them.

Some boxes I filled with dirt and other I did not. It just depended on what I was planting. Again, as the years go on I'll add more dirt.
Now if you remember the pictures of the weeds above.......I did not want to have to pull weeds like that again. I even put cardboard in some of the walkways. I didn't want to have to stuff the cardboard into a recycling bin so this seemed like a great solution. Then in all the walkways I put down mulch. I used Scott's Nature Scapes for the mulch and Kellogg's soil.
I even have a box for my daughter. She is in charge of growing carrots and radishes. One day we painted rocks for her little garden. For her I also plant strawberries and sugar snap peas. She loves to eat the peas straight from the vine.
See the cardboard peeking out below? Need a few more bags of mulch.

Corn sprouts!!!

Lastly, I couldn't' forget irrigation. I could totally picture myself watering my garden everyday. But I'm realistic. I have drip line going to each box and a timer to do the watering for me.

So now I'm going to cross my fingers and hope that all goes well. I can already see some critters starting to nibble on a few things so I'll be looking into organic pesticides. This was a project that took me almost a month to complete but was definitely worth it based on the time it should save me in the future.