Raised Square Foot Vegetable Garden - Update

If you are one of our regular readers, you’ll know we started a new adventure this summer…a vegetable garden!

It’s been quite a big project, from planning which seeds to plant to building a raised square foot garden bed with an arbor. It truly has been an adventure.

This was our first attempt at growing our own vegetable garden so we really didn’t know what to expect. We did a lot of research before we began building and planting to determine which types of vegetables were going to be suitable for our climate and the space we had available. We wanted to be sure we were making the most of our little garden bed.

After a few months of watering and nurturing, we are so happy to report that our garden is not only growing, but it is thriving! From the beginning, we were worried that nothing would grow, and all of our hard work would be in vain. But we had nothing to worry about!

I have been really excited about this project from the start. As a little girl, I can remember visiting my grandma’s home and heading straight to her backyard to scour her vegetable garden for ripe cherry tomatoes and fresh peas (my favorites!). There is something so delicious about homegrown veggies, especially sun-kissed cherry tomatoes picked straight from the vine.

It really is quite amazing watching something grow from a teeny, tiny seed into a huge, flourishing plant. In fact, since we took these photos a week ago our garden has grown so much that it is literally bursting at the seams and now producing lots of zucchini, beans, sugar snap peas, lettuce, and the pumpkins and cherry tomatoes are well on their way.

It’s a feeling of satisfaction, knowing all of our hard work is paying off. And, if I am being honest, I have to give Nick all of the credit for this project. Anyone that knows me knows that I was cursed with a black thumb, so I have simply been enjoying our little garden’s beauty and tasty veggies.

As I said, this was a new adventure for us, so we did a lot of learning along the way. One of the best pieces of advice we can give is to build a hoop house over your garden in the early spring, it made all the difference (especially given our climate and the colder than normal evenings we had in the spring). It gave us the chance to start planting our garden much earlier than expected (three to four weeks), and because of that we are already yielding produce well ahead of the season.

We’ve also come to realize there are a lot of benefits to a square foot garden. Everything is planted in close proximity so you don’t have to worry as much about pesky weeds popping up (a bonus for those you hate weeding!).

We also love that a square foot garden gives you the opportunity to try a lot of different veggies. If you’re anything like us, we couldn’t narrow down what types of vegetables we wanted to plant, we wanted to try everything. And I mean everything, from cherry tomatoes to watermelon. It is a fun way to learn which plants will thrive and which ones won’t, and what veggies your family enjoys eating and those types that your picky eaters won’t even touch. It makes planning for next year much easier.

This has definitely been one of my favorite projects to date. Watching our little one head out to the garden every night to inspect each plant and water her garden has become one of our favorite rituals. It will definitely be one of the summer’s sweetest memories for us.