WIth construction finished on our new room, the wonderful patio poured and only some painting to do, it is now time to focus on the outside.  This week, we have been working on getting our raised beds put in.  I have had a 8 x 26 garden for a couple years now.  Much of the space seems wasted, though, so I have wanted to do raised beds and square foot gardening for a while.  This year, we are going for it.

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First, we had to increase the garden size to 8 x 28 to accomodate our new beds.  Next, Hiscross and I made 5 4x8 raised bed boxes using 2 x 6's.  Ultimately, we are going to have our beds 8-10 inches high but we started with 6 to build up the soil a bit.  By the time the beds are all filled up, the 2 x 6's will need replacing and we can go onto 2 x 8's at that time.  I think this will work well.  We are all excited. 

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After the boxes were made, we pulled dirt into mounds in the center of  where each box would go.  Next, we set the boxes, Atthecross leveled them, and Thebean and I spread the dirt back out.  We soon realized we were going to need more dirt.  After a quick trip to Lowes, we put a huge block of peat moss, 2 bags organic humus and 1 bag composted mushroom mix into each box.  They still aren't full but as I add compost from our pile throughout the summer, as well as mulch the plantings, they will start to fill a but more.

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Tomorrow, we will divide the beds into square foot boxes for our gardening.  Then, we will put in our fist 6 broccoli, 6 cabbage, 6 cauliflower, 9 spinach and 9 romaine lettuce plants.  It may still be a bit early but these are cold hardy plants and should do well.  I can always through out a covering if we get a frost.  I will continue to plant more of these plants, as well as peas, through the next month on a weekly basis.  This gives us a nice weekly harvest and not one big crop. 

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We are excited to try this new method this year.  We used to have "208" square feet for gardening but I felt like we had a lot of wasted space and were never really happy with it. Now, even though we are only gardening 160 square feet, I feel like we have more usuable space and should get more with the square foot gardening method.   It will be interesting to see how it turns out.   If we need more space, next year we'll add another box or two.  We are praying that between this and our weekly CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) produce, we won't have to buy any produce for about 4 months.  Yipee!!