He's so handy

Our friend Wes gave us an old tiller that wasn't working. Phil set to work this evening to fix it up. He had it fired up in under two hours. What a guy!

Bed Layouts

This year we decided to plant different crops in in different beds and try to leave more space, especially around the bigger plants. We also decided to not plant some of the types of vegetables we did last year.

Phil said the smaller bed is more my  bed. It has lots of herbs, plus some vegetables (cucumbers, pole beans, jalapenos, lettuce, and carrots). I am also going to put in a few flowers. When we went and bought seeds today I grabbed some lavender which wasn't part original plan, so I'll need to figure out where that is going to go.

Small Bed (Jill's Bed)

The bigger bed will house most of the vegetables that we plan on growing. I guess this is Phil's bed (since the other one is mine). This one will have beefsteak tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, Roma tomatoes, bell peppers, banana peppers, broccoli, lettuce, carrots, onions, bush beans, and zucchini. Unlike my small bed diagram, this one does not accurately represent how many square feet we are giving to each plant. 

Big Bed (Phil's Bed)

The beefsteak tomatoes, bell and banana peppers, broccoli  will all have 4 square feet with one plant in the center. The lettuce will have 4 square feet for 4 plants. There will be a total of 32 bush beans in 6 square feet, and the same for the carrots. The zucchini will have 9 square feet per plant. 

So that is our plan. We'll see how it plays out. 

The start of 2012

Phil shoveling dirt

 Phil and I used our day off today to get the garden prepared a little for this year. We raked some leaves and added them to the larger bed. Phil made many trips to Carondelet Park for some free dirt. There was quite a bit of trash in the dirt so we had to be careful to pick out what we could find, but it's free!

We use plastic bins I previously used for a container
garden to haul the dirt in our van.

The large garden bed that as we filled with the new dirt.

All of our hard work paid off. I don't even know how many
trips it took to fill the big bed.

Small bed - only took 1.5 trips!

I was thinking about doing some cardio before yoga tonight, but after all the shoveling and raking I did today I think it is necessary.

Next up starting seeds. I'll also be doing a post that shows our layouts for each bed this week. We are going to do things a little differently this year.