City Girl Preps Veggie Garden – Diary Part 2

Last installment I talked about how we were planning on dealing with our infestation of deer.  As you can see from the picture below, short of a lead-based solution, I think we have done pretty well.

Big plan with less effort

This will be our first big garden, and my first veggie garden. Because we had the fence and the work of the initial setup of the garden to do, we decided that we would try to do the best we could reduce any effort that would be lost if we decided the gardening experience was not for us.  After some research I had decided that I would like to try a variant of square-foot gardening, something I always wanted to do after watching gardening shows as a kid. My other-half decided he wanted to try a variation on traditional row gardening.  Our variations did meet in the middle in our plan; the major difference would be the use of cardboard in both of our gardening schemes.

I lost my original pictures that I took when we were laying down the original layer of cardboard, the above picture does shows the cardboard just before we started adding the soil into my 4×4 boxes.  We had planned to use standard cardboard boxes that we get stuff delivered to the house in, but when we started putting it down, we noticed that it left too many holes for the weeds to get through, so we ended up buying a roll of cardboard from a local shipping supply store.  This we thought was a much better way to go, and it was great because we just rolled the cardboard from one side to the other, overlapping each row a bit, and there no holes in the layer of cardboard.  After we laid down the cardboard, we put my wooden 4×4 boxes over the top, then added the wood chips for paths. All that was left to be done was to add the garden soil.

Why the cardboard? – No tilling this year…

This year is an experiment.  The shortcuts that we are taking are some what calculated and we are hoping we can elaborate on them in the years to follow if we continue with gardening.  An example of this is that we have not done is run water to the garden.  The water source is about a hundred feet or so from the garden.  This year we will probably just run a hose out, and possibly only get as complex as a timed sprinkler system.  Not so pretty and definitely a risky proposition to the hose, come face to face with our mower, but it allowed us to focus on our number one priority: get the deer fence up and the garden down.

The cardboard was an idea was something that my other-half got from some research.  I have also found variants of the idea, some that go as far as people growing their veggies directly in the bag of soil that they bought from the store.  The part of putting down a layer of that we liked the most was that we would not have to till the soil.  We simply mowed the vegetation (grass?) down as far as we could, and then laid the cardboard over it.  Once the cardboard was down we could just add soil.

Here is a picture of my other-half’s beds that we had begun, adding the soil right over the cardboard, see also the wood chips we added for paths:

The idea around the cardboard is that nature will process all that fine vegetation below the cardboard into the soil, and then theoretically the plants would naturally grow into the soil above. We would not have to spray, tear out, or kill the vegetation already growing in the garden area, or till it.  By the time the plant roots needed to go deeper, the roots will find its way through the already composting vegetation and cardboard.  Neat trick.  Next year there will be that much more material added to the soil and we can either choose to till or add another layer.  We will probably do a bit of both.

And What’s this Last Frost Stuff??

I did get a couple things in the ground, some broccoli, strawberries, asparagus, etc… but where we live our last frost is around the first week in May;  and it says right there on the seed packets that I shouldn’t plant till after last frost. Oh hum…

Just another week or two more my little ones …  just another week or two…