It's Easy Being Green

Since I last posted about the progress of my new raised garden beds, I don’t think we’ve had more than two days straight without rain.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the rain but right now our yard is more like a mud bog with some portions verging on marsh-like.  I keep expecting to look out my window to see large water birds wading through the yard, looking for fish.

In order to complete my raised vegetable beds, I needed to locate the three items I needed the make the recommended growing media.  If you happened to miss my previous posts on creating this year’s garden check out Spring Fever and Garden Planning.  The three soil amendments I was in search of included bulk compost, Sphagnum peat moss and vermiculite.

Vermiculite ended up being the most difficult item to locate.  Even though it’s included in just about every ready-made bag of potting soil, I found it almost impossible to find by itself and in a quantity that was large enough as to not break the gardening bank.  Needing 25 cubic feet of the material, I quickly discovered that most gardening centers in my area wouldn’t be able to get me even close to that amount and they weren’t interested in ordering it in for me either.

Daylight Farm Supply was kind enough to price it out for me in 4 cubic foot bags and offered to order it in if I wanted it.  There was going to be a bit of a lag time to get the order so that’s when I got to thinking about the one place I drive by on a daily basis, specifically geared toward agriculture: The Warrick County Co-Op located in Vanderburgh County.  Sure enough they had vermiculite in stock at a little under $20 a bag which was the cheapest I was able to find it too.

Once I found my vermiculite supply I was set.  I ordered 4-scoop loads of well aged manure and compost from AP&P Soil Masters on Kansas Road and had them dump the large pile in my driveway.  After paying the driver I headed out to Rural King to get some peat moss and then to the county co-op to pick up vermiculite.  I spent about 3 hours playing mixologist, combining equal parts compost, peat moss and vermiculite to create my raised bed planting mix.  Without a wheelbarrow, I made a makeshift soil transporter with our little red wagon and two huge planting containers as my carrying buckets.

I’ve been dodging rain showers ever since, trying to get the rest of my raised beds filled with soil mix while trying to take care of other responsibilities around the house.  Today, rain be darned, I destined to get some more work done.  I finished filling in the raised beds and built the square foot planting grids to go over the tops of the boxes.  This is the grid system that lays out your planting squares.  It’s built using 4 foot lengths of wood lath that you buy by the bundle for about $5.

I also dug two holes about two feet deep on either side of my main aisle.  These were to sink my 4×4 poles into the ground to support the two picket fence panels.  I will also be attaching a swinging gate and building an arbor over the top of the 4×4’s.  The garden looks so much different from the last time I took a picture of it.  I’m excited about everything I was able to get done today and can’t wait to get out and starting getting some Spring veggies planted to take advantage of the cool weather.

It still looks like a construction zone but you can see my newly filled raised square foot gardening boxes with their planting grids and the new picket fence and two 4x4 posts waiting for a swinging gate and an arbor over the top

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