Let the growing begin

We've had an incredibly wet and chilly spring. Last year our garden was ok, but I lost much of it to weeds and then half our tomatoes to an early frost. This year we finished building our grow boxes. Brooke, my cousin, has had grow boxes like this for the past few years and they always have lots of produce with very few weeds. I'm hoping to document my garden through the summer to see how it goes. We've been following the direction of a book called More Food from Your Garden by Jacob Mittleider. If you're interested in reading more about this kind of growing without buying the book, Food for Everyone is a great website that goes along with Mittleider's growing methods.

We started building our boxes last year then finished by building a few more this year for a total of five boxes. We put some gypsum on the bottom then filled them with 75% sawdust and 25% sand. On top of that mix we added some premixed Mittleider fertilizer and some more gypsum. Pretty much a custom soil mixture that doesn't involve any dirt and as of yet, not weeds.

Here we are filling the boxes. Gray's friend, Brian helped out a ton. In the end we used two truck loads of sawdust and load of sand. Gray and Brian would be quick to point out that it was two thousand pounds of wet sand carried to the boxes a shovel full at a time.

Here the boxes are, all mixed and ready for planting.

On Memorial Day we planted the garden. The seeds are all covered with burlap until the first sprouts show up.

After some gardening the kids stopped to play a few rounds of Ninja Attack. I'm really not sure how this game works, but it's amusing to watch and usually end in fits of laughter.

Here we are a week after planting. Since it's rained so much, watering hasn't been a problem. The three cats and I are now at war. I am usually armed with a hose, they have no chance. We still have some work to do with gravel. Probably another truck load will cover the rest of the space between boxes and make it look a little prettier.

The far box has the first of seven trellis's that we'll put up over our tomatoes, beans and cucumbers. I'll train the plants to climb the trellis strings, using vertical space instead of building bigger grow boxes.

I've removed most of the burlap. Amazing little seeds... Too bad I'm going to have to thin some, I'm sure there's a life lesson in there somewhere. More pictures to come as my garden hopefully keeps growing.