Raised garden beds

So we bought our house April 29th 2011. I feel like we are still moving in and making it our home. Last year we focused mostly on the living room and kitchen seeing as how that is where we spend most of our time. This year we are focusing on the back yard. We had talked all year about building raised garden beds for the back. We are really into growing our own food and I think it makes cooking more fun.

How to build a raised Garden Bed

http://karewares.blogspot.com/2012/04/raised-garden-bed-tutorial.html

Karen has an awesome tutorial on this for those of you that do not have a boyfriend that "already knows everything" lol. He was like "I can do that no problem". And sure enough he used exactly this method without ever even reading the blog. I read it before hand so that I could give him informed tips had he needed it.

First what we did was put down the weed barrier along the whole back of our yard. We covered it with mulch and used a black edging between the grass and mulch.

As you may be able to see here the only thing a little different then the tutorial is since we made long skinny beds the middle of the bed is reinforced on the inside with a 2x4 to keep the wood from bowing.

Lots of basil for homemade pesto ! 

In the pots I decided to put in plants that are invasive so that they have their own places to spread out with out taking over my whole garden. Strawberries are in the middle, catnip is on the left blue pot and mint is in the right. These three plants are known to take over so having them contained by themselves really is key.

This first year was a little bit expensive for our garden because we did not have our composter going quite yet so we just bought all new dank ass soil and starts for our garden. I had seeds but kept forgetting to start them. By the time our raised beds were built we still had the seeds in a packets. Maybe next year I'll get on that.

We didn't fill the beds all the way with soil because we wanted them to have a little bit of room to grow with out the harsh winds blowing them over. It is also going to be good because next year we expect to put our starts in there. Cover the top with some old windows and make our own greenhouse outside for the starts !

Inspiration came from http://simplycountrylife.blogspot.com/2012/02/greenhouse-just-in-time-for-spring.html for the windows later on !