Loyal stevendkrause.com readers and/or square-foot garden enthusiasts will recall that last year, we experimented around here with a slightly modified version of the classic design last year, putting in what turned out to be a quite successful raised box on the side of the house. Here’s a link to a set of pictures from that.
It turned out to be a fantastic success, so I decided to “kick it up a notch,” so to speak, and thus was born “the huge square-foot garden.” Basically, the very far back part of our backyard has always been a bit of a problem as far as growing a lawn goes, and it is also the only other part of our yard (well, other than the front yard) where we regularly get sun. So I thought it’d be a good idea to both eliminate the weedy mess of that part of the lawn and simultaneously expand the herb garden with four 4X8 foot raised beds.
This seemed like a good and even “easy” idea at the time, but damn, that’s a lot of freakin’ garden. I don’t want to even begin to guess how many hours it took me to get it to this point, and don’t ask me how much it all cost either. Had I known before I started how much time and/or money this was going to take, I would have just kept mowing the weeds. But right now, it looks pretty good.
“What did you plant,” you ask? In the middle of most of the beds are perennials, mostly stuff from around the yard already just relocated here. Around the edges are mostly herbs, also relocated from other places in the yard. But we also have raspberries, a lot of vegetables I am pretty sure will work out well (cherry tomatoes, beans, lettuce), a few veggies I am dubious about (corn, for example), and some flowers from seed that may or may not actually appear.
I’m pretty confident that the stuff that’s hard to kill will do fine, and in a season or two, I am sure it will look lush and far less “new.” I’ll be curious to see what does or doesn’t make it by August.