One Lovely Saturday!

Hello all! What a beautiful Saturday we had this week! We started the day with a quick trip to the Friends of the Library Used Book Sale where I found a set of gardening encyclopedias from 1964. I bought the whole set and some other wonderful gardening and home books for $10. What a find! We then went to Lowe's to get the materials to make two more 4' x 4' square foot garden boxes. Seems like we will never get done building these things, but the end result will be worth it.

Here are the two boxes we built, but haven't placed yet.

If you aren't familiar with the square foot gardening method, I recommend reading Mel Bartholomew's book All New Square Foot Gardening (affiliate link). He details a very easy method of building the boxes like those picture above. We just used two 2" x 6" x 8' board cut in half to make the box itself. You don't have to worry about your existing soil being poor either. He recommends Mel's Mix which is a blend of compost, peat moss, and vermiculite. However, I have found that the organic garden soil from Lowe's works just as well for growing and is a blend of compost, peat moss, and perlite.

We spread out a healthy layer of that garden soil in the "flower" beds across the front of the house to get it ready for planting this year. We plan to put potatoes in the largest section of the bed. Last year we had put in a blackberry and raspberry. I also had some extra strawberry plants last year that we just sort of tossed in the mix. They seem to have mostly survived the winter and that awfully cold polar vortex. Sadly, my lovely rosemary may have bitten the dust. I am just hoping the roots are still alive and might come back.

The neighborhood kids also brought us some wonderful bamboo to use as a pea trellis. We went with a teepee style. Just have to add some circular supports to the teepee during the next week.

You can also see that we have the grid in place for the beds that are in place now. I thought the hot pink was fun and super visible!

I am in the process of making some large planters with a variety of strawberries for the front porch. So far I have the Alpine Strawberry seeds planted in one pot and a variety called Tennessee Beauty (pictured below) in another pot. We should have two more varieties soon.

We seem to have mastered the heater to maintain proper temperatures in the greenhouse now. Pretty excited about that!

Hoping to have some good weather this coming week as the carrots and a few other things should be ready to plant! Join me next week for another update!