Before I could plant anything in our raised bed, I had to de-weed it. It took me a day to get all the weeds out and the soil fit for the growing good things. The picture on the right shows the raised bed before I cleaned it up. It's on the south side of our house, so sunshine won't be a problem. Hopefully it won't back the vegetables too much come summer. Some of the weeds were waist high and tough little buggers. Now that the bed is cleared, we have a 3-foot by 20-foot bed to work with.
To conserve on water, I installed a drip system to irrigate the veggies. I'm hoping it works as advertised, since I don't want to be spending my evenings watering and weeding. We'll see how that experiment goes. In further experiments, our outside electrical conduit runs right behind the garden box, so I also had extra piping through to allow future lighting. It required digging a deep hole to and getting really dirty. Jon couldn't resist grabbing a shot of me in my sullied state.
The final results of stage I
. After getting the drip system in, I transplanted a my first set of vegetables. So far, I have a set of sweet corn, Two different kinds of tomatoes, two different peppers and some bush beans planted. Phase II will be planting the vegetables from seeds. These will include zucchini, pole beans, and a second crop of corn. If all goes well, we'll be have some tasty veggies coming our way in a couple of months. I'll keep posts updating our progress. Advise is welcome, and very much needed.
