Bed Layouts & First Seedlings

Published on 03/31/2009

Last Monday I couldn't sleep, so I got up at 4:00am, made my lunch, grabbed the copy of The Sustainable Vegetable Garden that I'm borrowing from Hillary, and headed out the door. I stopped at my office and picked up a clipboard and a pad of graph paper along with my mechanical pencil and click eraser and headed over to the 24-hour Starbucks in Beaverton to do some garden planning before work. I had measured the general area I had to work with up in the corner of our back yard, so I just needed to plan out specifically how to use that space. I came up with a layout of three 4 x 6 foot beds and one 4 x 4 foot bed with 2 foot paths between, for a total of 88 square feet of bed space. After I figured that out I started thinking about how many square feet of each vegetable I wanted to grow, using the example in the book I had with me as a starting point. I felt like I got some pretty good notes down. I still need to work on it more, but I felt a little more organized by the time I finished up and headed to work.

So, about a week later, this past Sunday—the first semi-dry day since my early morning planning session—I went out with some stakes and twine and marked out what I had drawn. Almost to my surprise the layout fit as it did on paper (my initial measurements were pretty rough). I saw that I could make a couple of the beds larger, but I think this will be more than enough space, especially since this is my first time ever trying to grow anything!

After staking out the beds, I had decided that I wanted to try to double-dig—a term and procedure that the aforementioned book recommended—one of the beds, and at the same time mix in sand and compost to improve the soil I had to work with. It's all clay back there. Well, I had been warned by my friend Hillary, her brother, and my Dad that the clay probably wasn't going to work... but I really wanted to try, and thought I could make it work by adding to it the components that it lacked. Well, I was proved wrong. The clay was ridiculously wet and I could see quickly how impossible it would be to do anything with it. I came away from my failed attempt pretty discouraged. I'm pretty broke at the moment and was trying to avoid having to buy all the materials to build and compost to fill raised beds, but now I know that is what I will need to do. I just need to get creative and find ways to do it as cheaply as possible. It'll be a good challenge. :)

So, in happier news, the above is a photo of my first seedlings taken on Sunday, a week after I started them. I was amazed on Wednesday morning when I saw green popping up from the soil. I totally didn't expect them to germinate so quickly. The main ones you're seeing here are the broccoli, but the lettuce and kale also showed themselves about the same time. I'm hoping to start a few more seeds soon, but for now I'm enjoying watching these guys grow. It's pretty amazing stuff.