Garden Progress

After two days of a lot of work in the garden, I feel like we are finally making some progress!  This is what I started out with in March:

 

Then the weeds took over faster than I could keep up and those cold lonely beds filled up with lots green…but it wasn’t veggies, it was weeds and grass from using hay last year! I couldn’t bring myself to take a picture of that, but here is some progress. Five of the 8 raised beds are planted and the one in the front of the picture with the manure mixture partially covering it will be planted in okra tomorrow!

The raised beds are semi-lasagna beds…they’ve been topped with lasagna layers (mulched leaves, mulched spoiled hay and a manure soil mixture) for the last two springs. I use newspaper and mulched hay for mulch to hold on moisture and keep out those awful weeds!

This is my squash bed. See the bigger plant? It is a volunteer (came up by itself) from last year! I left a few of those and they are doing better than the seedlings that I planted! I even have one in another bed getting ready to bloom!

Next are the tomatoes:

And the cucumbers complete with a fence to grow up leftover from last year!

 

Blue Lake Bush Beans here:

 

and finally some cabbage.

Remember this? All that pretty greenery is actually WEEDS!

Now it looks like this:

Ready to be filled with herbs and bird/butterfly attracting plants! The large clay pot is going to be another “tipsy  pot planter”.

This is my first completely "lasagna style” bed. This is only a third of the bed, I wanted to get a close up of these sweet sweet potatoes!

I know that it’s hard to tell much from these pictures, I just can’t figure out how to get a good angle to show things right on the ground! :-( The mess below is the beginning of several new lasagna beds. You can see the cardboard in the back. I lay that down first and I have stared using pulled weeds and grass as my first layer. I let them dry out and dry on the cardboard. Then I put my first 3 inches of top soil on. That’s as far as I’ve gotten on these. They will get a layer of shredded leaves and a layer of shredded hay and a layer of the manure mixture. I will start over with the layers if it’s not deep enough.

I almost forgot the taters! This is one of three beds. Some red, some white! I need to get busy mounding them up!

I’m off to bed so that I can get up early and get back at it!

Don’t forget about the giveaways, this at the thriftyba:

and if it’s not over, free paint at Glidden:

‘Night,