How does your garden grow?

We put in our garden this week! It's not anything impressive or complicated--just a little flower bed that we put a frame around and dumped dirt into. You see, renting a house with a tiny yard just doesn't make it easy to have a garden. Our tiny yard is also shared with our neighbors, so we can't exactly just do what we want with it and fix it later. The only piece of dirt that is really "ours" is this 8 inch by 9 foot rocky flower bed.

I would have loved to do a full garden, but between the available "land" and my lack of energy during pregnancy, we decided it would be best to do just a salad garden. After exploring the many ideas out there for container gardening--most of which were expensive or ugly--we decide that putting a frame around the flower bed would be best. My husband found some scrap wood at Lowes (they had been frames for riding lawn mower boxes) and so was able to get all the wood for the frame for under $6. That number was much more to my liking!

He drilled some 3/8 inch holes (I think) and put stakes through them straight into the ground to hold everything in place. It works like a charm (so far)! We thought about going a bit deeper, but decided to see if what we have will work...so our raised flower bed is only about 6 inches deep. This is all an experiment anyways, so, yeah, might as well be adventerous!

I filled it up with dirt, marked off my sections and planted some seeds. I had thought about starting all my seeds before the warm weather showed up, but I couldn't find a toddler-safe place for my seeds. :)

We planted baby romaine lettuce, royal red lettuce, simpson elite lettuce, mesclun mixed lettuce, green onions, radishes, carrots, bush beans, sugar peas, cilantro, oregano, thyme, parsley, bell peppers, and cherry tomatoes. That sounds like a lot, but we only planted a few of each.

The herbs, bell pepper, and cherry tomato that won't go in the garden. The herbs will go around the tomato plant in its 10 gallon container and the bell pepper will hopefully go in the ground in front of our little porch... we'll see how it does there.

And a few gratuitous shots of my little helper "helping" mix the dirt in my tomato pot.

She loves mixing everything she can.

Happy growing!
~Regina