Mae's Garden, Day 1...

So a few posts back, I told you that I wanted to plant a garden. Well, we finally have one! It's small, but it's a good start. Oh, and for the title "Mae's Garden"...Josh picked that out. He's going to make me a little sign to put in the raised bed. Let me start with a little background...I am full of ideas and dreams. I always have been, and always will be. I dream big! I have ideas galore! Now, will I ever try half of the ideas I have, will I ever reach half the dreams I build, probably not. But, I don't think dreaming is a bad thing. I have a wonderful imagination, and that's a good thing. I'm always thinking of new ways to do something more efficiently, or ways to better our home. It's just my thing, lol. Anyway, my sweet husband loves me for that, I know he does! BUT, he's a realist. While he does have dreams for our future and such, he's a realist and knows that half of my ideas tend to be a bit out there and couldn't be accomplished unless we had nothing but time on our hands and were rich enough that we didn't have to work and had all the time in the world to put towards these ideas. I do love him for being more grounded than I am, otherwise there's no telling what we'd have in our backyard besides a garden at the moment :o) Well, I was finally able to get him on board with the garden idea, so we got started!

Here is how our Saturday started...I had already researched anything and everything about gardening. I found some awesome websites about building raised beds and square foot gardening. I find both of those to be great ways to garden. One of the reasons I wanted a raised bed is b/c our DIRT, or red clay lawn, just wouldn't work. The tilling we would need to do and getting all of the big rocks and such out of the yard would take days. Instead, we cleared out the pebbles in our front flower beds and moved those to the back yard. Here are some pictures from the start of that project last weekend...






This is what it looked like last weekend...



And this is what it looks like now...Next year we'll be able to add pavers around it and take up the stuff that's around it now.

So we moved the rocks to the backyard where I wanted to plant the garden. Having the rocks there was an outline for the bed, and it should also help with drainage. The next thing I needed was a box. Let me just say, I am so proud of Josh. He has never built anything before (not b/c he couldn't, there was just never a need for him to), and I found some plans online for a raised bed, we went to Lowe's, got the lumber and screws and voila...











The box is absolutely perfect!! Thanks babe! So after we moved the box to the backyard and placed it on top of the rocks, we filled it with 3 bags of soil, then we placed screws 12" apart all the way around it to make the squares. We used twine for this.





After we finished making the individual boxes, we placed chicken wire around the garden so that the dogs couldn't get to it, but leaving enough space for me to get in there when I need to. There's also enough room for some potted plants (Yea!).

Once we had the bed in place and the soil in, it was time to plant...





The back row has lettuce in the 2 squares in the middle (the two on the outside are for sugar snap peas with grow vertically), the row in front of that one has tomatoes on both sides and carrots in the middle, the row in front of that one has cantaloupe in the two middle squares (one of the outside squares will have strawberries and the other will have green beans), and the front row has peppers in each square (jalapeno, red, and bell). Luckily we got some rain last night, and should today as well. Our water hose will not reach the garden, so that's something we've got to put on our list to purchase. For now, we'll just go out there with a bucket :o) I'm really excited about this garden, and pray that it produces so wonderful fruit and vegetables. This is just the beginning of what I hope to be an efficient way for us to save even more money on our grocery bill. I will keep you updated on it's progress.

If you've stayed with me throughout this post (sorry for all the pics), then I hope you enjoyed reading about it and will continue to read my weekly updates!

I hope everyone has a wonderful week ahead!!