Vegetable Garden

A couple weeks ago, we bought lumber and Rick built me 3 raised beds for a backyard vegetable garden. They are 10' long by 6' wide and 12" tall. Then he water sealed them. A week ago I brought home a load of horse manure mulch. It filled them about 1/4. Last week I bought 12 3-cubic ft bales of "garden soil" that must have weighed about 60 lbs or more each. Still they didn't fill the beds. I dug out surrounding ground soil and added that. Still not enough. Thursday after my job got rained out I bought 7 more bales of soil, and was able to plant.

From small plants: 2 kinds of basil, 2 different tomatoes, zucchini, jalapeño peppers, strawberries, chives.

From seeds: carrots, pumpkins, baby bottle gourds, variegated "Alaska" nasturtiums and regular nasturtiums.

I have a little space for something else like maybe radishes. I wanted but couldn't find purple basil. And I still need to put mesh, wire, string or something across the stakes to hold the tomatoes, cucumbers and gourds. I could plant some perennial herbs outside the beds. But I hate the smell of Rosemary(I know I'm in the minority there).

It's going to be fun to farm but it was way more money than I thought it would be. Watch for the progress :-)

By the way, the big shrub in the middle of the photo is Cape Honeysuckle, Tecomaria capense that needs to be pruned. It came with the house, needs hardly any water and the hummingbirds love it. To the right are my sweet peas that are almost done because of that hot spell.