Our Garden -- Phase 1

Well this is my first garden post and will likely be rather longish since I have a lot of photos documenting the progress thus far. Future posts will probably be shorter and at more frequent intervals.
This started out as a Mother's Day gift for my wife since she has always wanted a garden but already it has become a pretty cool family activity and as we move forward the kids as well as my wife and I will be pretty involved in maintaining our new garden.

Phase one -- tomatoes. Oh how many? I dunno... just plant them all. DOH! What do you mean tomatoes take up 4 square feet per plant?? Well I guess we'll be making a lot of salsa!

Yep these are all tomatoes... we're actually only going to use 14 of them and give the rest to friends who also garden... still that is a lot of freakin tomatoes though!

All the plants started bending towards the bay window in search of some better sunlight... so I gave them a table in the basement using grow lights.

Ahhh much better.

They straightened right up.

First green bean plant.

Cucumbers looking for something to climb. They will have a little trellis once I get them situated outside.

We read a little after the fact that both corn and bell peppers require warmer soil to start out so I built a germination station. This is one of those heat lamps they use for poultry incubators.

Jolly green bean giants (at least compared to everything else.)

The cornlings have arrived.

Building forms. (Thanks for the help Phil!)

Four yards of dirt is more than I imagined. I have plenty left over to build up around the foundation where we get water from time to time during heavy rain. If you are wondering, my daughter thought it looked like a mountain and carved a winding road into it.

A yard of mushroom compost, which by the way smells like the Lee's Summit City Dump... but the veggies supposedly love the stuff. The vermiculite is supposed to help the soil retain moisture.

About halfway through four yards.

Big bed is for veggies, medium bed is for melons (going to try growing watermelons and canteloup vertically... look for future posts on how and if I accomplish that) and the smallest bed (4x4) is for strawberries.

Sort of like a layer cake... made of dirt, vermiculite and rotting plant matter.

And MANY MANY thanks to my dad for the wonderful gift of a Honda tiller. Wow this thing works GREAT!

A good Memorial Day weekend's work completed!!! Now we let the mixture settle for a few days and planting commences. In the meantime we've been taking the seedlings outside for a couple hours each day to minimize the shock of transplanting. See you next time!