Update on the new garden

Our large project this year was taking a bare field and making it into a new garden space. We started off with a field that was mostly weeds and clay soil and with a lot of hard work, we’ve turned it into a new productive garden.

Here is how the garden space came together:

Mapped out the location

We started with marking out the location of our new garden. We measured out the space in the field and put markers down.

Leveled the ground

We used our bulldozer to level the ground and our excavator to cut out the raised garden beds.

Amended our beds

Between the raised beds we’ve laid down landscaping fabric and topped it with cedar chips to keep weeds down.

After we mapped out our raised beds and walking paths, we amended the soil in the raised beds. We added a mixture of organic 4way soil and organic compost.

Planted our seeds!

Our next step was planting our seeds and transplanting our tomato starts into the new garden. We are growing corn, green and yellow zucchini, delicata, tomatoes, basil and onions in the new garden. As you can see below, we laid out drip lines onto the raised beds and covered them with mulch. Mulch not only keeps down the weeds, but it also helps trap moisture into the soil. We had very little loss in our garden even with temperatures over 110.

Harvest our produce

We are already harvesting loads of zucchini, and will have tomatoes and onions coming in any day now. If you are wondering about the yellow flowers, those are marigolds. We plant them at the end of all of our rows as we’ve found that they help attract beneficial insects to our garden and repel unwanted guests. We also plant basil around our tomato plants to repel insects.