The New Garden

I've been a vegetable gardener for years.  The last few, however, my ambition has left me and I haven't given the garden the attention it deserves.  So this year, we decided to go 100% raised beds.  My amazing hubby has built three beds so far - we'll have five eventually but the tomatoes were actually doing well, so I insisted we leave them for the season.

Our beds are made out of cinderblocks, lined with black plastic (we're hoping that will prevent them from drying out too quickly), and topped with pavers the same length and width as the cinderblocks.  Each bed is three blocks high, and holds about three yards of soil.  The planting area is 101 inches x 39 inches.  We filled them completely with new soil, but about 12 inches down we put down a layer of landscape fabric, so if there are any stray weeds determined enough to make it up that far, they'll run into resistance and hopefully not make it to the surface.

We've decided to try intensive planting, using the Square Foot Gardening method.   Today I was very excited to get the first two beds planted with my first ever fall garden!  More details about that in a coming post...