Dirt & Veggies & Herbs, Oh my!

Where were we?  Oh, yes.  We built our DIY raised garden beds and attached some galvanized hardware cloth to the bottom to create a mole barrier.  After that, it was time for dirt.

It took almost two "scoopfuls" (two truckloads) of dirt from a local nursery.  The dirt is a special combination of topsoil, compost, and sand that they had available for gardening.

Seth shoveled it from the bed of the truck into the two raised beds (and later the herb beds) and I used a hoe to spread it around.  I believe it was close to 90 degrees that day and we were sweaty.  (Just painting a realistic picture for you.)

Next, we laid out our soaker hoses and used some landscape fabric pins to help hold it in place.

Hehe...Amos looks tiny next to the huge bed.

What I dislike most about gardening and adding new plants to our landscape is watering them. Not the act of watering itself, but the fact that I get eaten alive by mosquitoes while doing it.  They are horrible in our yard.  In short, our neighbors are breeding mosquitoes due to a grading issue in their backyard.  So in order to minimize the amount of time that mosquitoes are feasting on my flesh, we decided to utilize a soaker hose system in the garden.

It's definitely not the prettiest set up.  The closest spigot is located inside the carport near the back door so we had to run a hose through the carport and across the backyard.  We then attached a splitter, two short hoses (the shortest ones we could find at Lowe's), and the two soaker hoses.  

It may be ugly but it's definitely convenient.  And I have avoided West Nile virus thus far.

Alright...onto the fun part.  Planting some veggies!

We first laid out our plant choices to determine if we needed to rearrange the soaker hose, and then we started digging in the dirt.  Soon we had all of our plants in place.

The photo above shows our left bed.  It contains tomatoes and peppers.

red slicing tomato

red striped heirloom tomato

green striped heirloom tomato

sweet 100 cherry tomato

sweet banana pepper 

bell pepper (not sure if it's going to be red or green) 

cayenne pepper

poblano pepper

The right bed contains onions, yellow squash, zucchini, and okra.

red, white, and yellow onions

 yellow squash

zucchini squash

okra

As I mentioned in my previous post, we also decided to build a couple of smaller herb beds.  

They are 2 foot x 2 foot and constructed the exact same way as the larger veggie beds.  The front herb bed contains mint and basil.

mint

greek basil

thai basil

The back herb bed contains two cilantro plants.  Because we LOVE cilantro.  And because, for some reason, it tends to be out of stock at our grocery store almost every other week.

cilantro

I'm planning to "pretty it up" by defining the garden area and by adding some garden markers. Stay tuned.  Have a great weekend!