The Dream Garden (Planning, Construction, & Planting)

Even when we temporarily moved to the condo weren't sure if the sale was going to "go through," I started seeds anyway.  I know now that wherever I am, I need to have a garden.  It gives me such pleasure, I couldn't live without it.

Seed starting operation.

Dark & stormys on snow days are perfect for garden planning

I had an idea of where I wanted to garden to go and about how big we should make it.  To put things into perspective, when Mike and I first moved in together in Hippie Village we had two small raised beds and mostly did container gardening.  Then in Lambertville, it was a similar set up with some slightly larger raised beds and lots of container gardening.  So with this place, the space is endless and we wanted something fantastic.

Playing around with garden bed layout.

There's no better feeling than seeing these little seeds pop up.

Building the boxes and securing them into the ground was certainly harder than it would seem.  What helped enormously is getting a pallet of lumber delivered from Home Depot so that we always had wood on hand to build new boxes.  Leveling the boxes was kind of a nightmare, because this part of our property has a slight slope.

The arbor in the garden was made by my brother-in-law and we got married underneath it.

When it was time to get soil we ordered a dump truck full and had it delivered to the house.  Unfortunately, we had it delivered to the other side of the property, so we took dozens and dozens of trips with the wheel barrow to move the soil.

This is the view from our bedroom upstairs.

And finally we were able to put in some plants and seeds into the beds.  I did my best to make an optimal companion planting plan so each plant would do as best as it could!  For the most part, that was true.  However, we did run into some soil deficiencies, such as calcium, and we did have some crops that just didn't take very well (like lavender!).

These zucchini plants produced an insane amount of fruit.

Here you can see a few weeks into our season, the garden was filling out.  Also, we got a super late start on the season because of septic work, etc.  It should be a nice treat to garden right after the last frost this year!