We have tomatoe plants and green pepper plants here.
Here are lettuce plants.
We had a lot of soil delivered from Felgers Peat Moss and paid a pretty penny for it too. Our soil is clay about an inch down, so we knew that we'd need to buy soil for this project. We still have soil leftover from filling the 2 raised beds actually. I plan on using it to scatter onto our landscaping, and to put into pots for growing additional vegetables and herbs.
Here is our South-facing Wall of our house. The window you see is looking out from the kitchen sink. My view....a giant fence, but hey....it's a view right? lol We had decided that we'd place the beds to the right and left of where the water spicket was located for convenience's sake.
Here is a picture just after our plants were planted. It was very dark outside. It must have been around 9pm or so.
I've been studying these books like they were college courses for a time now. They are both very well written and have colorful and helpful pictures (I'm still loving picture books even at my age).
Ethan workded very hard to make these beds. He did a FABULOUS job and I was very proud of him! I called him my handy man for a while! lol
I had been thinking about trying to start up a little garden for over a year. Initially, I had brought a book home from the library by Patricia Lanza on her concept of 'Lasagna Gardening' over a year ago (just for fun at that point). Lanza's technique for gardening was easy, simple, and seemed to me to be the way to go for beginners like me. Her concept is to find the spot you want to place your garden, and build a type of organic compost on top of that soil where vegetables or flowers can grow. You'd first place wet newspaper layers on top of the soil (or sod) and begin layers of organic materials (mulches), using whatever is locally common, such as rotten hay, grass clippings, shredded leaves, horse manure, cow manure, between layers of something such as peat moss (which will help to stretch the water in the soil longer as well as keeping the soil cooler longer). The idea is that with time, these layers will naturally mix together with the help of earthworms that will find there way under the newspaper layers and within the soil itself, thus creating even better soil than the original layers provided!
Building the garden on top of the sod (even if this location has weeds in it) seemed like a great idea to me. Maybe I will do that someday soon, but for these raised beds, I did not use the technique I had planned on using. I just bought good soil, and filled the beds (which were made by Ethan from lumber purchased at Lowes) with the soil before planting my vegetables.
Who would have thought I'd abandon a year of studying the Lasagna Method of gardening for raised beds with good soil! LOL I find that funny.
Anyway, we will see how things grow or don't grow in the weeks to come. Some have shared with me that the soil I used is too nutrient rich for the vegetable plants to handle, and so they will probably not thrive. Others have told me not to worry about it; things will grow. ;) We will see one way or the other, and fairly soon.