My dream has long been to have a huge vegetable garden and a yard with fruit trees and edible landscaping. With our new house (built in 2016), that dream is coming true.
The main vegetable garden is on the south side of our yard where it gets mostly full sun, though it does receive some shade from the neighbors old maple tree and the woods at the west end of our backyard. I’ve added a compost and wood pile at the west end of the garden, and have plans for a greenhouse at the east.
This is the garden when it was first under construction, on July 11, 2016. the framed wood area is 24 x 50 feet. I later added an additional bed on the east (bounded by boulders), giving an additional 8×10 square feet, because you can never have garden that is “too big”.
Here’s a view of the completed garden a few days later. I added a few inches of Sweet Peet to give a jump start to building soil, because, as is evident from the photos, the soil I was starting out with was all clay and rock from the new construction.
My next step was to mark out the raised beds. I used rocks because I like rocks and had an abundant supply of rocks, what with those I’ve collected and saved over the years along with all the rocks and boulders I found and set aside after the construction team had finished digging the basement and moving the soil around.
This next photo is from August 20th, 2016. Here you can see where I was putting a few plants in the garden. This was not a permanent spot for the plants; rather I decided to use the garden as a holding area for flowers and other plants that I had saved and brought from our old house but was not yet ready to plant in their final location.
This is the garden the following year, on Memorial Day weekend 2017. The tall plants are Egyptian walking onions and garlic. Besides that, I had a little of everything growing, from Arugula to Tomatoes.
I added an arch and a little sitting area to enjoy the garden. I planted runner beans to grow on the arch. Runner beans are wonderful: besides having beautiful flowers, the beans are delicious!
