Adventures in Gardening I

In light of recent economic issues and after finally getting used to living in a house (and not an apartment), the wife and I have jumped with both feet into gardening. Sometime around late February, we decided that we wanted a garden. Seems pretty simple huh? After doing some reading, since neither of us ever had much exposure to it, and then arguing about about shape and size, I tilled out a ridiculously large garden for a first time venture. About 700sq. ft. to be exact, but hey, that's how we roll!

After much tilling and raking, and then some more tilling, it was time to start planting. About this time Cat and I changed our plan and switched to some weird hybrid of square foot and rowed gardening. The tilled are is about 12' x 65', so we divided that into about 9 12'x5'-7' planting beds separated by 2' mulched paths.
You can kind of get an idea from the photo. At this point we started putting in rows, which was not the best decision in hind sight.(Our soil has a tendency to crust, which is not great for sowing seeds.) Our first sowing of seeds was only moderately successful. Out of the lettuce and spinach, only the mesclun mix germinated. Sometimes I tend to miss some obvious things, like the fact that we live at about 2400' ft of elevation and spring takes little longer to get here than in the valleys. We had a freeze around the beginning may that killed alot of seedlings. Somethings we thought didn't germinate did once the soil temp finally became favorable. Other things like cucumbers and okra didn't germinate at all. As a result, we flattened the rows and reseeded lettuce and spinach, along with with putting in some transplants to replace the cucumbers and okra. At this point, about 6 weeks after the initial planting, everything is starting to come together. New sowings of lettuce and spinach germinated in record time, and I have crookneck squash coming out everywhere.

The corn was planted last Saturday and a few of them have started germinating. This is a big deal for me. I've been told by multiple people that corn doesn't crow well in our yard. I find that a little weird seeing as how there's a dairy farm less than a 1/2 mile from me growing about 100+ acres of corn. Needless to say, alot of effort is being put into the corn. All together I'm throwing myself into the whole gardening thing. There's something very satisfying in watching vegetables that I'll hopefully to be able to eat some of grow because of our efforts. Plans are already being made to go to a full square foot system with raised beds as we can afford to build them, along with a drip irrigation system.

My internal conflict is about how much it's worth to spend money on raised beds, irrigation systems, row covers, and on and on and on. I mean geeze, I'm growing vegetables here, not trying to split the atom. Is it really worth buying all that crap to grow more veggies in the same amount of space? My wife seems to think so, I lend towards that decision, but I keep getting hung on the spending money to grow stuff. I mean really, how much should that heirloom tomato cost me to grow? This year we've put about $100 into the garden, which I find to be completely reasonable, but we want to start most of our transplants, so there's about $200-$300 on trays, lights, pots, starter mix, etc. I want a drip irrigation system so we can use mulches more effectively to save water and time. I use these as examples because they're the biggies. Sometimes I wonder if we're making it more complicated than it really needs to be, but damn, I want drip irrigation!

Well, that feels better. I'll post more photos as soon as I have some more recent ones. It's raining, finally- we're suffering from what's labeled as an exceptional drought. A 17" deficit last year and almost 5" so far this year. Needless to say, I'm quite happy to see some rain. Looks like we might actually get over an inch.