May
20
Posted by Hollyann
Okey doke, I have some shots now of the trellis (that’s what I’m calling it, I don’t know if that’s right or not) and the plants we bought as plants and not seeds.
I built the trellis out of 3 pieces of wood (remember those?) and some of the nifty bright pink string that I also used to mark off my square feet.
We bought 4 plants that were already growing, 3 tomato plants there in the back and a bell pepper in the front. All of our seeds got planted the day before mother’s day, but no sproutlets yet, it’s still getting chilly at night, so I will give it another week or so before I panic and start digging things up. 
May
06
Posted by Hollyann
A while back, Christine, fabulous Gypsy Girl over at Pixel Gypsy Designs, mentioned square foot gardening in passing on the message board. I was intrigued, followed a link, and next thing you know, I’m building a garden. It’s been ages since I had one, so I need easy, and this certainly sounded pretty simple. The key word there being ‘sounded’. We are on a bit of a limited budget, so my first goal was to build everything I could using materials on hand. If you were too lazy to click on the gardening link there, the basic idea is that you make large boxes, for example 4 feet by 4 feet, then divide those into smaller squares of one foot by one foot, and plant a ‘crop’ in each square. Back to my building. Materials on hand. 3 pieces of wood. I thought for a bit about asking our neighbor if he had saved the old fencing a few months back when it blew down and he put up a new one, but then, while deciding where to put my boxes, I realized that the best place for them would require me to rip up this dumb brick that covers about a quarter of my backyard. Not opposed to that at all, as it’s… dumb, and looks tacky. So I think, hey, I am ripping that up anyways, why not just make the boxes out of the bricks I am tearing out? Brilliant!! Technically, this was totally a stunning plan. The thing is, it’s sorta harder to rip brick out of the ground than it looks. Especially when said brick has been there around 20 years and ‘stuff’ has grown between and over and around it all. Kayla was enlisted to help, and between the two of us we managed to get all the bricks out and build two boxes in about 4 hours. Our boxes are around 5 feet by 5 feet… it’s an estimate, because we couldn’t find a tape measure. Technically they are each 8 bricks by 8 bricks, and since we did find a 12 inch ruler and know that bricks are about 7.5 inches, that should work out right. If I did the math correctly, which would be amazing in itself. We did all this on Sunday I think it was, today is Wednesday, and my legs still hurt. You’d think 4 hours of moving bricks would hurt my arms, but no. Anyway, here are some before and after pictures:
Before:
See how the bricks are so tacky and icky? We won’t talk about the mess in the windows there, the sunroom/smoking lounge is MY area, I’ll clean it when I feel like it.
With one box built:
It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s got character at least.
With both boxes built:
This is also known as “where we are as of this moment” because I took this picture about 3 minutes ago. Last night we all went to Lowe’s and bought soil, and a couple little starter plants, and a lot of seeds. Today it’s supposed to be darn near 80 degrees here in lovely Colorado Springs, and my goal is to get the vertical frame built (remember those 3 pieces of wood I had?) so that the cucumbers and tomatoes have something to climb up,(climb upon? just climb? I think something’s dangling if I say ‘climb up’.) and get one box filled with the 12 bags of dirt I have sitting out in my driveway. Then if I have some time today I will set up my lines to divide the box into square feet. I anticipate more pain ahead, bags of dirt are not light. We are just planning on doing one of the boxes right now, see how it goes and decide if we want to do the other one later this season, or wait until next year.
So there is our (my) garden, as it is… I’ll post more updates as we go.