My First Vegetable Garden

I decided to plant a vegetable garden this year.  It’s my first try at growing vegetables and I’m a little nervous that either nothing will grow, or it will all grow and we will have too much. 

I have heard of Square Foot Gardening and it looked like something I could manage.  The concept of square foot gardening is that you plant one type of plant in each square foot.  Some plants require more room than others so you plant one/sq.ft. or other vegetables, like onions, don’t need as much room so you can plant 9/sq.ft. 

There are books you can read and lots of information on the internet.  But the one I found most valuable is this website.  You just say how many columns and rows you have, then find a vegetable and place it in one of the squares and it will automatically tell you how many seeds or plants can fit in that square.  I have 2 gardens, both 8’x3’ so I had 48 squares.  I decided to leave some plants that were already in the garden so I only used 32 squares.  Here’s my plan:

I couldn’t buy everything as plants, so the beans, peas, broccoli and romaine lettuce was by seed.  I hope they grow!  I never knew how small lettuce seeds were!

I am a visual person, so I decided I needed to have a grid in place before planting.  I had some old replacement vinyl blinds that I cut and used for my grid.  I thought this would be good because it would withstand rain and I could also flatten it and store easily. 

These beds had soil in there already, but I added 1 bag planting soil and 2 bags top soil.  The vinyl blinds were a bit flimsy and harder than I thought to get into the bed. 

Time to plant!  On paper it looked like my beds would be a good mix of plants and seeds, but after planting I noticed that one definitely looks more mature than the other.

Garden 1: Cantaloupe, peas, lettuce, cucumbers, beans, cauliflower & broccoli.

Garden 2: bib lettuce, peas, cauliflower, tomatoes, peppers (green, jalapeno & Caribbean hot), onions (red, yellow & sweet white), celery & beans.

 

Well, here’s hoping to a successful and plentiful garden!