The vine garden- as it looked in January 2010. It's needing some TLC before the planting season!











Whew- the bed is all cleaned up and turned.










Next, I divided out the space. The shape and space for this area is awkward, but I think I divided it pretty well by basic "square foot gardening" principles. I "placed" each crop into a square on a plan drawn on paper. Seeing the whole garden laid out beforehand made it easier and faster to plant the seeds in the garden once it was ready.


The vine & lettuce garden planted with all the winter veggies: lettuces, broccoli, and peas- January 18, 2010. The kids had fun poking the little seeds into the ground. The planting goes MUCH faster when you have a plan in place!

Garden in the snow

Well, our 2010 garden plans have been coming along well.... until today. We had record snowfall here in McKinney, TX. and now the garden is buried under about 10" of snow!! The good thing is that most of the seedlings are indoors waiting for the last frost. Currently planted outdoors right now are onion bulbs, some strawberries, peppers, and some winter lettuces. I think everything outside will be OK, but we'll see! I hope so.


In the photo, you can see the first square of the garden, and my plant markers just barely peeking out of the snow. This was at noon. Now, at 2am, you can't even tell there's a garden out there. It just looks like a big white blanket! More pics and news for the 2010 garden will be along soon.

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Location:Quicksilver Dr,McKinney,United States

Adding the grid...

The next step was to add 12" squares, like a grid, in order to create the "square foot garden." You plant one type of vegetable in each square. The idea is that you can plant more in less space using this method. Since we only have a suburban yard, and no acreage for running long rows, this idea really appealed to me. (Maximum harvest, minimum space!) There are several ways to create the 12" squares: buy thin wood strips and nail them together like a lattice, use stakes and tie twine across them, etc. Since our garden is 4' wide, as suggested in the book, we chose to buy 4' long bamboo at Lowe's (you get 25 in the package- perfect for our garden!) and tie twine onto the stakes at every foot and space the stakes 1' apart, therefore creating the 12" grid. Sure, it look a while to do (about 1.5 hours), but it only cost about $6, so it was the cheapest method I could come up with!
This first photo shows the knotted twine on the bamboo. The second photo shows a section of the completed grid, and the third photo shows our entire garden, with it's 12" grid, finally making the completed base for our seedlings that have been growing inside for the last 4-6 weeks! Next, we plant the garden!!!