It has been about 4 years since my first garden, it was a simple 4' by 6' raised bed garden. My kids and I picked the fresh vegetables just about as fast as they would grow. I was supersized to taste how sweet carrots would be fresh out of the ground. It was also fun to see how much my girls enjoyed picking and eating fresh veggies. To this day my youngest daughter prefers broccoli over a homemade donut. Over the 4 years I have added raised bed after raised bed until this year when I decided to go for the big one. This year I have decided to go from 200 square feet of raised bed to about 1,300 square feet. Doing this I have three goals in mind.
- To produce enough food for my family on staple items like beans, carrots, tomatoes and such.
- To sell enough veggies to pay for my seeds and starts, my guess is about $200.00 a year as I plan on saving as many seeds as I can.
- To produce enough food so I can make a delivery to my local food shelf once a week.
Today is October 20th and this project started around October 1st. The first step was a neighbor came over and rototilled a spot in my yard of about 60' by 80'. The kids and I were so excited to see such a transformation of the land take place, and of course we promised him some fresh veggies as long as the growing season was good. The next step was to get about 1,500 feet of free board. This is turning out to be a harder challenge that I thought. I looked at craigslist and posted a local ad with no real luck. I decided to ask a neighbor that does concrete construction to find out that they do have a burn pile. Excited that I had something to work with and knowing the company had about 15 employees, I told them that if the growing season was good, I should be able to get them some produce for the lumber. After installing about 240 feet of new garden I realized that the burn pile did not have as much usable lumber as I originally thought it might have. Many pieces are short and just not tall enough for a raised bed. Realizing my supply of lumber was running out and winter is setting in I decided to focus on free compost. I posted an ad locally and got a response for some horse manure. I picked up about 30 pounds, not nearly enough for my whole garden however it is enough to do a test plot to see how productive the plants will be.
Knowing I only have a few weeks before it just gets too cold in Vermont to work on the garden, I will not install the full 1,300 square feet this year. In the future weeks I will do my best to keep adding to the garden while keeping the blog up to date so please check back to see the progress.
