Raised bed for vegetable garden

Update 7/21/14

 

I have added another raised bed to my little garden. So now I have 3 raised beds. I have one bed for tomatoes, one bed has squash, peppers, and watermelon. And the third has okra and pumpkins.

 

I love gardening but it is a work in progress. I learn something new every year. We had to put a fence around the garden last week because my dog kept eating my little watermelons. LOL!

 

This is one of the baby watermelons my dog ate!

 

 

Ya'll, this little garden is so easy to do. It's not expensive, it doesn't take a lot of space and it is super easy to maintain. I am so happy with my little garden. I hope some of you will try it and have great success with growing vegetables.

I have wanted to build a raised bed for a vegetable garden for quiet some time. Our soil is very sandy and seems to grow weeds very well, but not much else. So I finally convinced my husband that we should have a raised garden. We decided to use concrete block for the bed walls. We put landscape fabric down first.

It was recommended that we put down hardware cloth to keep the moles from digging up into the raised bed. But hardware cloth is pretty expensive, so we found a plastic garden fence that had very small holes and decided it would work just as well.

Over that we set the concrete block. We bought 20 block for the 4 x 8 bed.

We got 1 cubic yard of garden soil from the local nursery and filled the bed.

I don't know yet how many of these beds we will have this year. But once we start buying our plants and I can see how many will fit in the bed, then we will be able to decide how many more beds we might need. I will post pictures of the beds once we have the plants put in.

 Phase 1: We planted cucumbers, squash, bell pepper, okra, basil, parsley, lavender and catnip. In phase 2, we are going to add the tomato plants once they get a little bigger.

 This is my tub of sweet potato plants.

 These are my three tubs of Georgia sweet onions.

 Phase 2: We planted some of the tomatoes to fill the bed and built the fence for the cucumbers to climb.

Phase 3 will be building another bed for the rest of our tomatoes.

Phase 3

This is the second bed for the tomatoes.  It has 8 rows 4 plants wide. I think we will have plenty of tomatoes!

 This is a picture of both of our little garden beds.

We already have squash blooms.

And okra buds.

And little tiny lavender blooms

Onions

Sweet potatoes.

Sunflower bed. I will be sure to post a picture of these once they get bigger and start to bloom.

 And my 2 fig trees that I am trying to take special care of so that they don't die. I have tried to plant fig trees before and have never had any luck with keeping them alive. So I am babying these two so that maybe one day I will have some figs.
 

 UPDATE ON MY GARDEN 5/31/13 - Everything is growing and growing!

 

This is the bed with cucumbers, squash, okra, bell peppers, tomatoes and some herbs.

This bed has 32 tomato plants

Little tomatoes

This tomato is just starting to turn.

Little squash

Little bell pepper

Little okra

Sunflowers

Update:  June 30, 2013

I have been fighting bugs in my little garden. First they tried to devour the leaves from my tomato plants. In just one day, they managed to do considerable damage. I panicked and immediately bought Sevin dust. I hated using something like Sevin dust, but I was afraid my tomatoes would be damaged beyond repair if I didn't act quickly. So I dusted everything and it seemed to help for awhile.  Now something seems to be eating my okra plants. But this time I am trying to find an organic solution to the problem.

So I have been doing research on organic pest control. I have found a few good websites. This is one of them: http://www.tomatocasual.com/2008/08/04/organic-tomato-pest-control-101/

It lists a few recipes for getting rid of bugs. I am going to try the soap and oil water combination.

Another good website is:  http://www.tastefulgarden.com/store/pc/Insect-Information-d10.htm

This website has lots of good information for organic gardening:  http://wellnessmama.com/2524/organic-gardening-natural-pest-prevention-and-control/

This website has a few other recipes for organic pest control:  http://www.ehow.com/way_5244853_homemade-organic-pesticides-tomatoes.html

Ever heard of using epsom salts for fertilizer? Someone told me about it so I had to look it up. I found this very good website. http://www.garden.org/articles/articles.php?q=show&id=68

Now some updated pictures to show the progress of the garden. First, I have many sunflower blooms and one has already opened up! YAY! This is the little cutie:

My very first sunflower

Sunflower patch

Tomatoes

Okra, bell pepper, squash

sweet potatoes

July 13, 2013

We harvested all of the tomatoes even though most of them were green. We had to pull the plants up because all the rain was making the tomatoes rot before they turned red. This is how many we picked:

 We are going to try growing pumpkins in the old tomato bed. I will post the progress.

This is one of the pumpkins I had last year. (2013)