Setting Up Raised Beds in the Garden!

I love playing in the garden, but I’m not physically able to do a lot, so it almost always requires help from my husband.

Unfortunately, during peak gardening season is when his work is crazy busy with meetings all evening, and it gets delayed until late June, and I plant everything late.

I hate it.

This year though, we discussed it, and so we’re pushing hard in the garden every nice day there is.  He starts his meetings in less than a week, so we’ve cut it pretty close.  This way the beds will be ready, and I’ll be able to do the planting on my own, AND things will be planted on time!

I’ve been using grow bags, and we now have six of those ready along with my failed cattle trough.  We moved them around which involves emptying them and moving them, and we added two grow bags.  The cattle trough, of course, isn’t movable and is still frozen.

One is a great deal taller than the rest – most of them are 100 gallon grow bags, but I bought several 200 gallon ones that are new this year.  (I was so happy they started making them!)  The big one in this photo will be used for my tomatoes.

We also cut down our evergreen bushes.  They were damaged during a hard freeze + stiff wind a few years ago, and they never quite recovered.  So my husband and I cut them down to make room for more raised beds.

You can see two of the stumps there, and we cut them as short as we could manage to put raised beds on top of them.  There’s a ton of needles, and we uncovered quite a few rocks we didn’t really know about that I’ll have to move.  This will all be covered eventually with black landscape paper and raised beds put in.

Also, our meter man should be a lot happier now that he doesn’t have to push through the prickly bushes.

Chives are already coming in:

This year I set up a planting schedule based off of a guide I found; I’ll show that in another post.  But according to the guide it was time to plant my collard greens.

They’re kind of lonely, but there will be more later.  And would you believe I’ve never eaten them?  Sad, I know, so I thought I’d try them out this year.  It told me on the package to plant them as soon as the ground is workable, and our raised beds are thawed.

I have a planting plan laid out with a chart and planting dates, along with quite a few seed packets, but I’ll save that for another day when I’m starting to put them in.

Are you already playing in your garden?  What are your plans for this year?  Is the ground workable yet where you are?  Inquiring minds want to know!  *smile*