Yard Work Weekends

 The past two weekends have consisted of hardware stores, dirt, flowers, sore legs and smashing tons of bugs that would attempt to crawl on me. It has been tiring, for sure, but when Spring hits, I just get an itch to beautify everything outside.

Last weekend, we noticed our neighbors were fixing up their front beds, and we thought it would probably be best to start with that, since that’s what everyone sees when they drive by the house, and that would take the least amount of time.

2 azaleas and a bunch of begonias/petunias/zinnias later? I think our front yard garden is pretty fantastic looking, if I do say so myself! (We already had a ton of iris/amaryllis bulbs in the garden, as well as 2 indian hawthorne bushes we bought last Fall.)

The rest of the weekend, we cleared some old bushes in the backyard and also built a small shed (from a kit) in the back (that was mostly H, actually). It came out pretty cute, actually.

This past weekend, my big project was finally installing our square foot gardens. I purchased 2 of these kits at our local Sam’s Club, because the kits had raving reviews and for $40 (in store price) for a double raised garden? It wasn’t too shabby!

The only bummer about those kits is the double garden size is 3.5 ft. x 7 ft. So, two 3.5 ft. x 3.5 ft. gardens. Not an exact foot measurement, but eh, I think I made it work. I do love that these kits assembled super easily (no screws, nails or anything) and the materials are pretty darn heavy (sturdy).

We decided to fill the gardens with Mel’s Mix, which we made on our own. We purchased the vermiculite at a local nursery ($29 /4 cu. feet, which beat the heck out of $20/2 cu. feet at Home Depot) and the compost/peat moss at Lowes (compost was $3/2 cu. feet and peat moss was $10/3 cu. feet).  We mixed everything in a wheelbarrow a few cu. feet at a time, and it really didn’t take too long to mix it that way. It ended up costing us $110 to fill up 2 kits with the soil mix, which really wasn’t that shabby!

Here’s one bed filled. You might notice the cardboard below the kit. That’s not only to prevent weeds/grass from growing in the bed, but also to provide the drainage the garden needs (since paper is porous). Coincidentally, we were able to use the box from the shed kit. The front and back of the box were the perfect size to place the garden kits on top of.

Once that was done, I placed the veggies in the garden to get the spacing right. Then, I just dug holes with my hands (yeah, no hand shovel needed…this soil mix is SUPER light and easy to dig into) and placed the veggies in the garden! Here’s the first kit done…

And…here’s the second kit done! After everything was planted, I gave the garden a good soaking with the sprinkler.

 I’m way excited to see what our garden produces this year. I’m hoping we have better luck with the square foot garden vs. just planting veggies in the ground. 🙂

Here’s what’s in our garden (so far…we still have some room to plant a few more things):

• creole tomatoes
• cherry tomatoes
• heirloom tomatoes
• sweet basil (and also a purple basil, which should make for a really cool pesto)
• green, yellow and purple bell peppers
• bush pickle cucumbers
• jalapeno peppers
• poblano peppers
• cucumbers
• chives
• dill

Have you started on the ol’ Spring yard work yet? What are you up to in your gardens this year?