Garden Boxes

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. If that's the case, then this is officially my longest blog post ever. We recently completed a large family project that we hope will pay big dividends in many ways. In some respects, it's probably my version of "the mound" except that it involves a vegetable garden instead of a pile of dirt with shrubs, flowers and weeds.

We took out a large section of our yard and built some raised bed garden boxes, each about 12 feet long by four feet wide. As you can see by the pictures, everyone got involved and worked hard to put this garden together.

We custom-mixed the compost, peat moss, and vermiculite using the square foot gardening approach (thanks for the book in Christmas of '07, "little" brother B!). This gives us a very loose, nutrient rich bed to plant in, requiring minimal effort for weeding (assuming you get a quality compost with no weed seed in it), no fertilizing required, holds moisture well, but doesn't compact when it rains (as it's known to do in Oregon). R, L, and Ju would load compost into the wheelbarrow in the front while Je, A & I would mix the compost and load it into boxes. We had a good time and were all worn out by the end. Also, this was the first chance to haul a trailer with my truck which was fun.

There are five boxes total, each with individual names. Their names are (in order from the furthest away from the house): 1. Sabbatical (the first box we built, also the tallest one, named because we built it during our sabbatical year), 2. Mount Roberts (named after the pile of sod that used to be there, which the kids were fond of and had named Mt. Roberts, so we named the box after the former mountain to help smooth over the emotions of removing the mountain), 3. Center Field (named so because it's in the center of all the boxes, although it's technically in left center field in the context of our backyard baseball stadium), 4. Sky (I'll tell you why later), and 5. Shadow (because it's closest to the house and for the early part of the season is in the shade. It was originally named Shady, but we decided we liked shadow better).

Box #4 was the last to be named (interim name was TBNL - to be named later) because we couldn't think of a name. Then, one day someone said, "I want to plant in Shadow!" (referring to box five). Then our little R replied, "I want to plant in Sky!" And that's how the last box got it's name.

We are very excited about our garden boxes. Each of the children have assigned sections to plant and care for, and we are looking forward to them being able to learn responsibility and the law of the harvest as they care for their gardens. They have been excited each day to go out and see if anything new had popped up in their section of the garden. Our little R was the last one to have something sprout, and she was thrilled when she saw the zucchini and potatoes in her box coming up!

So far we have been able to eat some carrots (planted last fall since they last through the winter), lettuce (just a few smaller leaves so far, but starting this week we won't need lettuce from the store for the next 2-3 months), and one small radish just for the fun of it. We have peas, beans, carrots, potatoes, radishes, spinach, cilantro, corn, onions, and zucchini all sprouted now, plus we transplanted several tomato plants and bell and jalapeno peppers. I built the tomato supports out of conduit and nylon netting.

Anyway, we've had a blast and are now ready to watch the garden grow, excited to care for and harvest the plants, and hoping we can keep the neighborhood cat from thinking this is it's personal array of litter boxes!