Garden Layout

We live on a small property - roughly 6000 square feet. Our front yard is quite nice, but completely unprotected from marauding deer, which makes it only good for growing edibles that deer can't stand. Our lemon and lime tree do great out here, but everything else, practically, gets messed with. The backyard is a very, very small, postage-stamp-sized yard, half of which is dominated by a driveway, and a remaining third of which is covered by decking. Our lawn is probably 10 x 15. We have several growing areas:



4 "square foot garden" boxes that are 2x4, totally 32 square feet of gardening space with different box depths
2 border beds with great dirt that edge the lawn: the northern and southern
Pots - a dozen or so pots varying from the small ceramic variety to the 10 gallon black plastic nursery style



Square Foot Gardens
We have four boxes for square foot gardening. All four boxes are 2' x 4', but two are small (only 8 inches high), while the other two are big - over two feet high. Each box has 8 square feet (hence "Square Foot Gardening." We usually put two boxes together, making one section of 16 mini-plots.
Small Boxes
The small boxes were our first ones. We them last year for my birthday, and by "we" I mean my lovely husband who came to my rescue when he saw I couldn't use a power drill and then took over the project (yay!). We built them according to the directions in the Square Foot Gardening book and filled them with the famous "Mel's Mix" that the book tells you to create.

We kept our small SFG boxes on our driveway for the summer. They sat on a few pieces of wood, so they could drain. We attempted to grow lettuces, basil, corn, tomatoes, beans and various herbs. Most of those didn't do so well, but I'm pretty sure that mostly had to do with badly timed crop planting and over/under watering.

Big Boxes
This year, I picked up the two large boxes from a woman who was moving. I found them on Craig's List. They were a tremendous pain to move, as they also came filled with organic soil, but as I learned last year - dirt ain't dirt cheap. The big boxes are on industrial grade casters, which is a blessing and a curse. The blessing is they are easier to move, the curse is that I think I want them where our small ones were last year - at the top of our driveway, in the flat spot, just before a steep drop down the drive. One little nudge or earthquake, and it could be bombs-away on the boxes, sending them hurling down the driveway directly into our gorgeous new deer gate!

Our choices are to:
A) find a new spot for the boxes or
B) remove the casters

Normal Garden Beds
In addition to our square foot garden boxes, we have two border beds that run along the north and south edge of our lawn.
Southern "Flower / Lettuce" Bed
The southern bed has very rich soil, though it's not particularly deep. The dirt is partially shaded by a rose bush, sage bush and some flowering bushy thing. I think that I will be putting lettuces in this bed this year. Last year I had lettuces and two determinate tomato plants. They never got big, but they did produce extremely sweet fruits.

Northern "Real" BedOur northern bed is triangular-shaped, appears to be a totally normal raised bed that, until earlier this week, produced some lovely flowers from bulbs, and these freaky, little-shop-of-horrors plants:


Blech. They give me the skeevies.

Anyway, they're out now and I'm glad! Like any amatuer gardener, I was reticent to pull them, since I assumed they were priceless thinger-ma-bobbers. Now, I don't even care. I'm stoked they are gone, as they creeped me out, and now I have this gorgeous bed to do something really fun with!

Sundry Pots
We also have a few sundry pots and potted plants. Most of those are on our front porch. I may move some herbs into them later this season. In addition, I really hope to get a strawberry pot or two, as well as some potted blueberry bushes.