Our garden is finally coming in — lettuce, broccoli, basil, tomatoes, zucchini, cauliflower and peppers and hopefully more to follow.  We’ve already enjoyed several salads from the leaf lettuce — nothing better or fresher than lettuce out of your garden.  Now I’m hoping to put in a berry patch — already started with some blueberries.

When you live in a rural area and use a septic (which we had to have put in brand new) instead of a public sewer system where you can put your garden in can be limited.  Your garden needs to be far enough from the leach field so it doesn’t contaminate your vegetables.  The leach field is the most expensive part of the whole septic system so you don’t want to plant anything near it that might have deep roots like trees or shrubs.  We just moved into this house in February (yes moving in winter in Upstate NY – not the best idea) so this garden is an experiment for us.


The Easiest Way to Start
In order for us to get a garden in right away we used cinder blocks that we found on the property and filled them with top soil.  We bought seeds and started them ourselves using Jiffy pots we bought at Lowes (see blog post Seed Starting Experiment  3/30 for a review Jiffy seed starting kit) such as herbs and bought plants for lettuce, tomatoes, peppers and zucchini.  Bought lettuce plants because they don’t transplant well from seed (could sow them directly into the garden) and since we have such a short season we bought the other plants to give them a head start.

I’m not sure if other gardeners are like me, but I tend to over buy, I buy too many plants and too many seeds (just started some heirloom tomatoes that are suppose to do well in my area) so when it comes time to plant I have to keep expanding my garden.  By using cinder blocks this is easy to do and economical (we had them around the property) and can be bought at a home improvement center for about $1 a piece, just remember they can get heavy if you buy a lot of them at one time.  If you would like an easy way to weed or harvest, stack the blocks as high as you need, just remember the higher you go the more soil you’ll need.  Using cinder block will make short work of getting your garden started:

FIRST
Decide where the best place for your garden will be, by seeing where it fits into your landscape (taking obstacles like a septic into consideration), where it will get the right kind of sun and how you easily get water to it.  Another consideration for me: how far is it from the house.  If it’s a long trek to the garden I’m not as likely to give it the attention it deserves.

SECOND
Lay the cinder blocks out in the configuration that works best for you.  Remember you can always add on so make sure your configuration allows you to do so.  Also make sure you leave enough room between beds to walk through.  Nothing hurts worse than scraping your bare skin on a concrete cinder block.  Once your formation is established then fill them with soil and plant.

Mark filling another bed.  Notice the muck boots.

Square Foot My Way
The cinder blocks we used have a large opening in the middle, which was good for larger plants like tomatoes or broccoli and smaller holes around the outside of the block that’s good for herbs and lettuces, giving us a choice on how we want to plant.

Broccoli

Basil

San Marzano tomato I guess you could say this is a version of square foot gardening. We can get a lot of plants into a small space making it “intensive: and it seems to be working so far.  There is minimal need for weeding and it makes it a little less appealing to squirrels, chipmunks and rabbits –my motto: plant 2 for me and 1 for the critters. It might not be the prettiest garden but it works and we’ll probably do it the same way again next year, but we’ll take our time and set them in an interesting arrangement and add fencing and other doodads to decorate it with.  Right now I’m happy with fresh lettuce for salads and herbs for cooking and look with anticipation to the tomatoes and other fresh veggies.  There’s nothing better than cooking from the garden and as things come in (Some time in August I’ll be overrun) I’ll be sharing recipes using my garden ingredients. Have a unique garden? Want to share a cooking from the garden recipe?