Living Intentionally by God's Grace: #43 Vegetable Garden Complete

Can you tell I'm on a mission to keep squirrels out??

Finally the vegetable garden is complete. I'm very satisfied at the turnout. Today my boys planted in their own 4x4 square foot garden bed and they did a great job. We used the square foot gardening method by Mel Bartholomew. Check out Square Foot Gardening at this Youtube link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5Lu-7FIj_g or read about it at this link http://www.melbartholomew.com/category/beginners-guide/.

I started off by doing the most important thing. Adding Organic Compost and Peat Moss to my soil. For me, it's important that I add these things to my soil because I want to use organic methods in my planting. Since organic fruits and vegetables are so expensive, this is an economical way of doing it myself.

The right side is done and you can see the difference in the soil

I then began my process of using chicken wire to enclose the two raised beds. I purchased a large roll at Home Depot and I got the smaller one free from Freecycle. If you are not familiar with Freecycle -- check them out here http://www.freecycle.org/. I absolutely love Freecycle because it is a way to keep things from filling up in our landfills. It's a network of people giving and receiving things absolutely free.

I pounded four stakes into the holes on each side of the raised beds. I then attached the larger chicken wire and used my staple gun to attach the wire to the stakes. I then used fabric & garden staples to pin the wire into the dirt. All this to keep those pesky squirrels and rabbits out of my garden! No more stealing my investment!!!!!!!!

The top one I purchased and the bottom one I received free from Freecycle!

Purchased bags of staple clamps for the garden at the DollarTree

After that was done the boys filled in their square foot gardening planner. You can get your free planner here: http://www.5dollardinners.com/free-gardening-planners/ They added the vegetables and fruit they wanted to plant to their planner. This eliminated them having to put down name tags next to the plant. They only need to look over their planner to see what is growing. Here's a close up picture of one of the beds:

I heard it was a good thing to add Marigolds to keep out the bad insects.

The boys then began to plant. They followed their planner and added the seeds to each 12x12 square. They planted 3 types of spinach, 2 types of peppers, lettuce, watermelon, parsnips, onions, and other things in their beds. I added other containers for tomatoes.

You may ask, how do you get into these containers and the raised beds. Quite simply. For the raised beds, when I wrapped the chicken wire around it I only attached it to the sides and the back. I constructed the front part of the chicken wire to work like a door. It swings open to the left and I can then tie it up when we are finished. It tied to the top with yarn. It can be opened easily when we need to get in and weed or collect the harvest. Also with the containers, I can easily take the top (roof) off to get to the fruit. Also, when the tomatoes get bigger I can enlarge the wire and attach a stake. I love it!

Oh I almost forgot another secret weapon that helped last year keeping those squirrels out of my containers was this: