The Vegetable Garden

Our vegetable garden has been a slow build over the five years we have been here. When we moved in there was a small, raised bed garden in the back yard. It was built with two landscape timbers stacked on top of each other for the border. At this time our garden experience was limited to what we learned while helping our parents when we were kids. Although we were inexperienced, we realized this garden bed was a bit rough and likely wasn’t maintained by the previous owners. The quality of the soil was nonexistent, it was the standard clay we have around here. Regardless, we gave it a go and started working on getting a garden planted.

First, we removed the landscape timbers, then we borrowed my dad’s tiller to break up the soil. One fun discovery while tilling was the 2×4 that was covered and rotting. This board was intended to be a separator, but with the lack of maintenance ended up covered. Thankfully, the tiller was unaffected, and we carried on. Once tilled we planted tomatoes, bell peppers, jalapenos, watermelon, cucumbers, honeydew, potatoes, sweet potatoes, red onions and yellow onions.

Between the soil quality and our inexperience, we didn’t have much of a harvest. A handful of bell peppers and Roma tomatoes and a few jalapenos. The potatoes and sweet potatoes produced beautiful vines and flowers above the soil but the few spuds we dug up were partially eaten. The cucumbers and melons had a few flowers pop up, but nothing much came out of them.

 I believe we had the start of a watermelon, but it stayed about the size of a softball. No honeydew produced and the cucumber produced a few baby cucumbers but nothing we could harvest. We were bummed about the cucumbers because we went through the trouble of making a trellis out of some lattice and scrap wood we had laying around. If I remember correctly the lattice came off the original deck of the mobile home we lived in prior to this house. Overall, we learned a lot from this garden and made plans for the next.