Adventures in Gardening (#1 in a Series)

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Mark McNease/Editor

Before moving full time to our house in rural New Jersey, my husband Frank and I had very little success with our attempts at growing a vegetable garden. Gardens of any kind, especially vegetable gardens, require frequent watering and care. We were only here on weekends, driving out from New York City, and then not every weekend.

That all changed last year when he retired and the company I worked for closed their Manhattan office, freeing us to finally move here. I was determined to have a decent garden, and we did. Lots of tomatoes, voracious cucumber plants, and some failures, too. It’s a learning process.

It’s only mid-April, still cold and wet. I wanted to double the size of our garden from 4 x 8, to 8 x 8. You’ll see in the photos that I did raised beds (and fencing to keep out the deer and rabbits). It’s so much easier than trying to till a plot of dirt, especially if you’re older. You just put cardboard over the grass, fill the dirt in, and start planting.

This garden is extremely easy to set up and a delight to maintain. I can recommend ordering the cedar garden kit from Hayneedle.com (you can find the exact kit I got HERE). It’s only $71.69 as of this writing, and eschews the fancy for the practical. The wood is unfinished, which is fine with me. It’s about the garden for us, not the boxes. Plus it’s a lot less expensive.

The bed is very easy to put together – the side boards slide into the end posts. As you can see in the photo, when I got a new one I just added it to the existing bed. It’s all slatted and cut so you can do that, avoiding any space between the beds.

This year we are going to see about paying someone (our lawn guy, hopefully) to get dirt into the beds, and adding dirt to the bed from last year. It needs to be a good 6 inches deep. Ours flattened out with rain and needs to have more dirt in them. Dirt is extremely heavy. If you can afford to pay someone to fill the beds, great. I’ll do it again myself if I have to, but this stuff can really kill your back.

I’m also going to plant some rose bushes in pots this year. One of the good things about leaving room between the beds and the fencing is that we can put pots there. We had tomatoes in a couple pots last year, and a few vining flowers. I aim to do more, and better, this year.

Stay tuned for this adventure. I’ll include my experiences, good and not-so-good, as the season progresses. I know we’re doing tomatoes (lots of water, and use very tall, sturdy tomato cages) and cucumbers (be sure to use lattice or something else the plants can climb, cucumbers are greedy and have very long vines). The rest I’ll write about as we go along.

Join me. Gardening is good for the soul. You’ll have lots of vegetables to eat and give away, and plenty of  flowers to show you what peace looks like.