Small box gardening

One of the things my family wanted to do in 2012, and well to be honest 2010 and 2011, was create a garden and grow vegetables for the dinner table. 

In between bouts of being too sick to get out of bed, I would sit on the couch or in my backyard and watch the arc of the sun along our backyard. In February I had a window of relative un-sick, so I build a 4x2 small box garden along the side of the house. Around the garden I put up a short chicken wire fence to keep out any animals that might sneak over the wall and  the posts allowed me to string up some light netting to keep out the birds that would try to eat the seeds before they took. Over all it went pretty easy thanks to some help from the local nursery on proper soil and gear. 

I surprised Mistress, and for those who haven't followed my blog very well, that is the alias I gave my wife, with the garden box when she came home from work. One of the things I handed her was a .pdf spreadsheet of when it was best to seed and harvest vegetables in our area for year round gardening. 

Mistress got right at it with fear that her efforts would produce nothing or she would kill everything off. The hardest part has been watering every morning, as I did not hook up an automatic system. 

The photo is about two months into the first harvest. There is pumpkin, corn, tomatoes, cilantro, lettuce, carrots, sunflowers, sage and bunch of beans. We have already snipped some of the herbs and a tomato for salads and little dishes.As you can see by the little pink tools our DD likes to help out too. 

It went so well that I decided to go a little bit bigger, in the next post, you'll see how that went.