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Loyal stevendkrause.com readers and/or square-foot garden enthusiasts will recall that last year, we experimented around here with a slightly modified version of the classic design last year, putting in what turned out to be a quite successful raised box on the side of the house.  Here’s a link to a set of pictures from that.

It turned out to be a fantastic success, so I decided to “kick it up a notch,” so to speak, and thus was born “the huge square-foot garden.” Basically, the very far back part of our backyard has always been a bit of a problem as far as growing a lawn goes, and it is also the only other part of our yard (well, other than the front yard) where we regularly get sun.  So I thought it’d be a good idea to both eliminate the weedy mess of that part of the lawn and simultaneously expand the herb garden with four 4X8 foot raised beds.

This seemed like a good and even “easy” idea at the time, but damn, that’s a lot of freakin’ garden.  I don’t want to even begin to guess how many hours it took me to get it to this point, and don’t ask me how much it all cost either.  Had I known before I started how much time and/or money this was going to take, I would have just kept mowing the weeds. But right now, it looks pretty good.

“What did you plant,” you ask?  In the middle of most of the beds are perennials, mostly stuff from around the yard already just relocated here.  Around the edges are mostly herbs, also relocated from other places in the yard.  But we also have raspberries, a lot of vegetables I am pretty sure will work out well (cherry tomatoes, beans, lettuce), a few veggies I am dubious about (corn, for example), and some flowers from seed that may or may not actually appear.

I’m pretty confident that the stuff that’s hard to kill will do fine, and in a season or two, I am sure it will look lush and far less “new.”  I’ll be curious to see what does or doesn’t make it by August.

It’s been a pretty busy spring and summer this year, but we’ve still had time to have a fine and successful square-foot garden experiment on the side of the house. Back in mid-April, it was pretty much just a plot with dirt.  Now here we are in mid-July, and the garden is going mad.  Here’s a link to the set so far; a few highlights:

• The peas Will and I planted from seed back in late April/early May have come and gone– we got two good meals worth of stir-fried snow peas (with other things, of course).
• The lettuce was great too; I think we must have gotten at least a dozen salads out of that. We’re about to leave town tomorrow, but I think that Will and I are going to plant a mix of green beans and carrots after we get back.
• And those tomato plants are freakin’ huge! We’ll see what the actual tomatoes look like though.

Last week, Annette and I took some time on a Tuesday to go to Blocks Stand and Nursery to buy a wide variety of plants for cheap, including everything now in the square foot veggie garden seen here– except the peas, which Will and I planted from seed a few weeks before. I suppose if I was a “real gardener,” I’d grow everything from seeds, and I’d preferably start growing seedlings in about February under some light in my basement. But since I’m not a “real gardener,” I buy fairly large plants ready to go into the ground for that impressive, “wow he must be a real gardener” look.

Will and I did most of the planting together on Saturday last weekend. Will simultaneously complained about the work and diligently planted things, as if he was unsure if he was supposed to think that gardening “sucked” or was fun. We had some cold weather that could have been a freeze, but nothing so bad as to damage the crops. And at this point, I think weather-wise we are in the clear. I think.

As you can see from the picture (if you click on it, you can seem more or less a map of what’s here), we’ve got lots of tomatoes, zucchini, and yellow squash. For whatever reason, we don’t seem to get that much zucchini or yellow squash from the CSA farm where we get a share of produce, and tomatoes you grow in your yard are always the best. I’m attempting to grow the zukes and squash “up” with the help of tomato cages; we’ll see how that goes.

I also mixed up Mel’s mix for flower pots, hanging baskets, and window boxes too. I’ll be curious to see how that works out because I think it is basically a somewhat better deal than buying potting mix at a place like Home Depot, and it is more satisfying to make your own, too.

Just in case you are wondering where my recent header here came from….

We’re trying a new gardening experiment this year: a long version of a Squarefoot Garden to suit the space we have. We don’t have a lot of sun, and this narrow space between our house and our neighbors (out of the picture, but probably less than ten feet away) is actually the only part of our yard where we’ve had any luck growing tomatoes over the years; thus this modification, which is two feet wide and sixteen feet long.

Of course, we can’t even think about planting much (maybe some seeds? maybe stuff like chard?) until after Mother’s Day because of frost and the like.

Depending on how commenting on essays, meeting with students, and generally wrapping up the term goes next week, I might be able to work up a batch of “Mel’s mix,” which is 1/3 compost, 1/3 peat moss, and 1/3 vermiculite. This might actually be the most tricky part of the whole process. Home Depot didn’t have vermiculite, and it seemed a little pricey when I asked about it at the Ann Arbor Home and Garden store; of course, that is easily the most expensive and/or over-priced store in town. Stay tuned….