Our house when I was growing up always had a backyard garden. When I was younger, it didn’t mean a lot to me. I didn’t have an interest in gardening. My mom is a phenomenal gardener and has a real green thumb, but she definitely didn’t pass that on to me!
Even though I’m not a great gardener, we plant a vegetable garden every year. Even in our very first apartment, we grew a few potted vegetables on the balcony. I was even able to dig up a super old photo of a potted basil plant growing on our balcony to prove it.
Over time having a garden has become really important to me. I enjoy planning the layout and going to the garden center to pick seedlings each spring. The excitement of a freshly planted garden, and of course, making a meal with fruits and vegetables grown in our own yard.
Vegetable gardening is, in my experience though, a bit of a crapshoot. Some years we have had overflowing garden beds and brought in mounds of fruits and vegetables. Some years (*cough* last year *cough*) some raccoons/woodchucks/bunnies eat everything down to a nub and you get a few habaneros that were apparently too spicy for their taste!
This year we decided to invest in building raised garden beds that we could fill with a good soil/compost mix and individually fence in. Raised beds come with a lot of benefits, like fewer weeds, better drainage, warmer soil, and less soil compaction. We were also excited to find these rigid metal corner pieces which made the beds really easy to build. They also have an open square hole that we are using to attach fencing.
We ended up with more garden beds than we had previously, and that would fit into the old fenced-in area. Luckily, when we installed this fence, we didn’t set the posts in concrete. We wanted them to be easily removable if we (or future owners) decided to remove the garden in the future. We compacted them really well in the dirt and they held up just fine. The wire fencing is a lot lighter than pickets which I think helped a lot.
After that, it was just shoveling and moving 7 yards of soil to fill them all! I won’t lie, I really underestimated just how much dirt 7 yards was. It took us two days to move it and get all of the beds filled. It was worth it, but oh man was I regretting my whole plan at the time!
Here’s the layout for this year’s garden with the new beds. Our raspberry and blueberry plants live in half barrel planters up on our deck and the strawberries are in a little hanging planter.
We still have some work to do with the fencing, but the garden is growing so well this year already! I can’t wait to post an update later in the season!
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