The Garden Grows and Grows

For Mother's Day, Karl and Kai built me a raised bed garden. This vegetable garden, nestled between two parking spots in our back alley has a lot of light, but not a whole lot of ambiance. No matter. I was determined to make it work. In past years, I've just thrown zinnia seeds down the length of the plot, watered them and hoped they grow. Thanks to our hot, humid summers, grow they did so we always had tons of bright flowers. This year, however, I'm looking for a bit more order and a lot more vegetables.

The raised bed is about 8 inches high, 7.5 feet long and a bit more than 2 feet wide. Following the Square Foot Garden recipe, I filled it with a mixture of soil from our compost pile, peat moss and Perlite. Unfortunately, I couldn't find vermiculite at any of the garden centers around here. I also filled quite a few pots with the mixture for tomatoes.

After the first few plants I put in the ground were eaten by squirrels, we erected a fence around the perimeter and covered the whole thing with netting. The second round of plants have really taken off -- last week I had to remove the protective netting as the plants were growing into it too much.

I still planted zinnia seeds and my neighbor gave me a bunch of volunteers from her garden so I'll still have flowers. In the raised bed (I can't call it a Square Foot Garden officially because I never put in my dividers), we have a sugar baby watermelon, yellow crook neck squash, zucchini and another crook neck squash in the back row. The front row has basil, eggplant, cucumber, carrots, bell pepper and another cucumber.

The pots include a six or seven yellow teardrop tomato plants due to my overzealous seed planting. I've run out of friends and neighbors to give them to so I'm left with the rest. I also have another pepper plant, some carrots, a Brandywine tomato and a cherry tomato plant. Finally, I accidentally bought a watermelon plant so I stuck it in a pot. We'll see if the vine can travel along the side of the flower bed.

Karl's going to build a trellis on the north side so that I can train the vines to grow up. I'm hoping that I can train the tomatoes to grow up against our fence wall.