Garden Designs - Gloriousgal Studio

So this particular blog posting is to give some substance to my future post. I will be mentioning my garden quite often, so I thought I should show my efforts in bringing it along.

I have been in my house for almost a year (a year in late August 2011) and I had plans on making a vegetable garden as soon as I moved in, but that was very unrealistic. However, during the fall and winter, I did my research on veggie gardening and such. In the end, I decided to do a raised garden in the front of my house because the back of my house doesn’t get Sun because of large pine trees and the side of my house only gets about 3 hours of Sun a day because of the privacy fence.

I have always wanted to plant a garden when I got a house, but I also really wanted to do this because I wanted to save money. Food is expensive!!! So what better way to save money in the long run than growing your own veggies.

So I started at the beginning of April this year (2011). I had some spider attracting bushes in the front of my house that I wanted to get rid of so I trimmed them back with hedge clippers and then dug up the roots. My daughters had fun helping me.

That took some hours, but I was grateful they were gone. Instead of stopping for the day, we continued on and put together two 4ft by 4ft raised beds. I bought them from Home Depot for under $40 a piece (I purchased everything for my garden from Home Depot). Putting them together was very easy, even a kid could help do it. 🙂

When they were done, my daughter and I carried it over to the spot in front of my small front porch that we cleared out. After that was placed, I added 4 trellis because I planned on growing peas and beans. There are so many different kinds of Trellis

I decided on two 6ft wood fan trellis and two 3ft fan trellis. That way, when my peas and beans begin to grown up the trellis, it will also provide shaded cover for the front of my porch. I had to anchor the trellis with some wired ribbon, that is typically used to train your plants to grow up the trellis. I anchored it to the raised bed frame. I didn’t want to use the mounts because I didn’t want to drill into the front of my house.

I put two up one day and added the soil. The next day I added the other two and the rest of the soil. Now for soil. I used Miracle Gro Garden Soil for Flowers and Vegetables. They have small bags and they have really large 20 pound bags. I started with the small bags and then got big bags. I think I used about 200 pounds of soil when it was all done (more or less).

Now, some things I grew from sprouts and some things I grew from seeds. So I started planting April 4 and 5.
From Sprouts: Broccoili, Romaine Lettuce, Spinach, Flat leaf and curly Parsely, sage, rosemary, leeks.
From Bulbs: Yellow Onions, and Red Potatoes
From seeds: Sweet Peas, Bell Peppers, Collard Greens, Baby Buk Choy, Carrots, Basil

From this pic, most of the veggie are on the right, but on the left is the leeks, onions, broccoili, basil rosemary.

I was so excited, when I started seeing my first seeds start to sprout (the carrots and greens) about 2 weeks later

So everything was going great, until we had 1 late frost in late April. I was not paying attention to the news and didn’t find out until the following morning. Most of the veggies that I planted are frost resistant, except for the broccoili. So needless to say, they were the first to go.
Then not long after that my greens died. But everything else continue to florish. As you can see from the above pic, the Collard Greens are the ones that are starting to wilt in the middle. My Bell Pepper plant also did not sprout.

At the beginning of May, I ran into another problem, some stray dog kept doing it’s business in the empty area of my garden. I was going to go and buy a fence to put around it, although I really didn’t want to, but instead, my mother told me to put some black pepper down, and surprisingly it worked.

So this next photo was taken last week. My potatoes have gone crazy and are spreading, which I knew they world, however, they over-shadowed and smuthered my Buk Choy and thus, they died. I also started to train my Sweet Peas by tying them around the trellis with some gardening ribbon.

Additionally, in this photo, everything is growning nicely except my basil didn’t sprout properly .

Now, last week, I had to harvest some of my spinach, ( I need to harvest some of my Romaine to, but I don’t have room in the fridge yet 😉 ) that is why two pictures up you can see a silver strainer, and the next few post will be about 3 amazing dishes that I made using the spinach.

I also added a few more veggies to my garden last week.
From Sprouts: Bell Pepper (since it did not sprout from seed), cherry tomato and yellow curve-neck squash.
From seed: Green Beans, Asparagus Beans (like chinese long beans), Corn

Now I am waiting for the new additions to sprout and florish.