First, select a sunny spot...

I'm pretty sure that I've checked out every book on gardening from the Lebanon library (except the ones from the 1970s with the garish photos on the cover because I never want a garden that looks like a psychedelic tropical jungle hemmed in by brick work.) You think I would have taken the authors' cumulative advice to heart on how to establish a garden, but I managed to ignore all of it and to pick the worst sites for vegetables last year. Too dark, terrible soil, and I reaped a very poor harvest accordingly. Very sad but of course COMPLETELY AVOIDABLE!

Had I heeded the advice of Chapter One of every gardening book, I would have picked the sunniest spot for my garden, but the only sunny spot is in the front yard and on top of our septic leach field. Roadblock #1. But this spring we had a big frankenpine taken down and amazingly, our yard near the driveway now gets sunlight - yay! Roadblock circumvented.

Adam built several raised garden beds out of Douglas fir planks and these cool metal corner brackets, which he filled with a mixture of aged manure and loam. I'm using a modified version of Mel Bartholomew's square-foot gardening method, what I like to call the "yeah, that's probably about a foot" gardening method. I don't own a 12-inch ruler and didn't want to get dirt in the tape measure, so I just eyeballed it. Which is why some of the tomatoes are a little more tightly bunched at one end of the bed.



So now I've got my vegetables in the right spot so let's see how this season goes! The weather has been surprisingly warm and the plants are loving it.