Tour Our Vegetable Garden

COME ALONG WITH ME AND TOUR OUR VEGETABLE GARDEN. CHECK OUT OUR NEW RAISED BEDS AND COLD FRAMES AND SEE WHAT WE HAVE PLANTED!

My kids and I have been very busy trying to get our vegetable garden in shape this spring. Due to the demands of our farm last year I pretty much let our garden go to pieces.

I started the spring with great intentions last year and potted up hundreds of little seeds. But, before I could get them in the ground, life and farm happened.

Our wonderful kids tried to pick up the pieces and get everything planted and into the garden, but they work hard on our farm too. And without mom there to guide and help it kind of failed. We did harvest a little lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, and basil from the weedy mess.

We mostly had lots of weeds and dry barren ground. Don’t ask me how those two things can happen all together, but in our desert climate, they can.

Our vegetable garden needed restoration

So, it was with great trepidation we started out this spring. We all so badly wanted a successful garden to fill the pantry this year, but it was a real mess after last season. Thankfully, we are not afraid of hard work and we knew we could restore it if we focused on one thing at a time.

If I was better at before pictures you would be able to see what it looked like just six weeks ago. Obviously, I’m not or I would have those pictures here. Sigh! Alas, my type A personality just marches right in and gets going. Usually, about halfway through I think, “now why didn’t I take pictures of this before I started?” Ugh!

My gardening methods and style have evolved a LOT over the years. Let’s just say I now garden with a mix of no-till, Back to Eden and permaculture ideas that seem to work with my soil, in my climate, for my lifestyle. 😉

New structures for our Vegetable Garden

So, as we started on the clean up this spring we had a thick mat of grass and weeds to remove and horribly compacted, dry dirt with no organic matter that needed some serious amending. My four old raised beds were rotting and our cold frames had rotted years before. It was time to build new ones.

Salvaged 2″x6″ redwood raised beds

Needing to rebuild the garden on a budget forced me to be creative. I remembered that we had salvaged a bunch of redwood 2″x6″ boards from a pool deck my parents took apart last summer. Redwood is very rot resistant and these would make perfect raised beds.

Our 12 year old son that loves woodworking projects quickly made four taller raised beds to replace our rotting ones. They are 4’x7′ because I don’t like to lean in more than 2 feet and 7′ fit our space. They are two boards high.

Movable redwood cold frames

Then I mentioned that I wanted some new cold frames and we came up with a way to build movable cold frames that fit atop half of our raised beds.

These were done in a sort of Eliot Coleman fashion. I have long loved his books, Four Season Harvest, The New Organic Grower, and The Winter Harvest Handbook. As well as his no-till gardening techniques and his movable cold frames.

In these frames, we can plant cold season crops, like kale and broccoli, right in the cold frame in the early spring on one half of the bed. As the weather warms and those plants can transition to outdoors and we can move the cold frame off of them to the other side of the bed and put in more tender plants or seedlings.

Of course, we can also plant late fall and winter crops in the four cold frames as well. Eliot Coleman harvests all year long from his cold frames in Maine!

Our cold frames are two 2″x6″ boards high in the back and one high in the front. We made simple hinged windows by making a frame with 2×6″ boards ripped in half the long way and making a dado slot for the glass to fit in. Each window is secured with two large hinges.

They are 2’x7′ so they fit perfectly on one-half of the raised beds. To support them properly we added one extra top board down the middle of 4 of the raised beds.

Our son was able to finish two of the four cold frames which was enough room to move all my seedlings out of the back porch and into better light. These cold frames are low tech and built with used glass and scrap wood. They are much easier and cheaper than a greenhouse. And just as effective for seedlings.

New layout for our vegetable garden

As we were hand weeding and leveling the ground we decided to re-divide the garden into four equal sections. Three for our three-year crop rotation plan and the other for the raised beds, potting area, composting bins and the water faucet area.

By doing this we found room for three more raised beds in that quarter of the garden. Our son made these without the middle divider because we do not plan to use them with our cold frames.

The three crop rotation sections will loosely rotate between root crops (potatoes and beets), heavy feeders (tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and zucchini) and legumes (peas and beans). Of course, it all doesn’t fit that perfect and there is always going to be some slight rule breaking. 😉

What we grow in our vegetable garden

Not all the vegetables we grow are listed below because we grow some, like watermelon and corn, in a larger space elsewhere on the farm or this is not their season.

Currently in the raised beds

• Onions – white globe, green bunching, Walla Walla, and Red onions
• Herbs – green and purple basil, parsley, and dill (we have a permanent herb bed just outside the garden for perennial herbs.
• Radish and carrots
• Spring Musclun mixed greens and romain lettuce
• Peas – both snap and whole peas
• Tomatillo
• Zinnias

Currently in root crop section

• Potatoes – Red Pontiac, Yukon Potato and Russet
• Beets – Red and Orange

Currently in the legume section

• Bush beans – royalty purple pod and Camilina beans
• Pole beans – Purple King, Kentucky Blue
• Dry beans – black turtle, pinto
• one bed of tomatoes (told you I am sometimes a rule breaker)
• on bed of melons (ditto)
• Zinnias for cutting

Currently in the heavy feeders section

• Tomatoes – mostly paste type, a few heirlooms and a couple cherry tomatoes
• Peppers – sweet bell, Marconi types, and hot peppers
• Cucumbers – pickling
• Summer Squash – yellow squash and zucchini

How we keep our vegetable garden manageable

1. We don’t till the soil – this disrupts the natural layers in the soil put down over time and causes more weeds to grow
2. We used a LOT of whole-tree wood chip mulch (like Back to Eden method). This is the most important step to cut down on weeding, keep soil moist longer, and to add organic matter to the soil as it breaks down -use on pathways, in raised beds and flat growing beds
3. Utilize PVC pipe and drip tape for irrigation to conserve water and keep it where we need it. We do not want to water pathways and cause weeds to grow.
4. Only spend time and energy to grow the veggies we love and use
5. Use succession planting so we can harvest smaller amounts at a time over a longer season – (lettuce, beans, carrots) Harvesting can take up a lot of time so keeping that time manageable is important.
6. We install heavy support systems for our tomatoes, pole beans, and melons that will hold up throughout the season without repairs.

Our Vegetable Garden Video

My ‘Can’t Live Without’ Garden Tools & Helps List

My top three most used tools in my veggie garden and yard are my Hori Hori, my latex dipped gloves and my Felco pruners. These three items go with me EVERY time I go out to work in the yard and garden…without fail!

Shep Ogden’s book also had a great impact on me years ago and I used his bamboo tomato trellis system for many, many years before converting to my current system shown in the pictures.

These 72 and 128 cell “speedling” trays and drain trays are my absolute favorite for starting seeds. My plants are never root bound and it is super easy to water from the bottom with these floating styrofoam trays. I have used them for 4 years now and they still are in excellent condition.

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More helpful gardening resources

Organic and Heirloom Seeds & Tools and lots of great videos: Grow Organic,

Heirloom Seeds Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds

Thanks for stopping by the farmhouse!

I would love to hear about your spring garden and what you are planting. Drop me a comment below and if you enjoyed this, give me a facebook share and help me grow this little farm life community!

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