A New Garden - In a Dog Pen

Well, it has been a long time since I added a post to this blog.  Last year we didn't even try to grow anything in containers.  The deer had been too effective in 2010, and all we harvested from four tomato plants were four cherry tomatoes.  No matter how many chairs and small fences I made to block the deer from the edge of our deck, they found their way through and had midnight snacks each night.

Now it is 2012 and we have a brand new idea on how to restart our garden.  In the garage we had the parts for a dog run.  Since we don't use the run, we decided to create the garden inside a fence.

The garden pen is 10' x 10'.  The beds are raised 10" above grade.  We know that rabbits can slip through chain link with ease.  We watched them get away from our Welsh Terrier that way many times.  And there were the few that didn't hit the chain link holes just right and Cassie got them instead of them getting away.  Fortunately, that didn't happen too often, but Debby will say it happened too many times while I was out of town.  Here is a close up of how we hope to avoid the rabbit problem.

What looks like double fence is just that.  I added a 2' high section of poultry wire around the inside base of the chain link.  The fence sections are resting on 4x4s.  The 2x10s that make up the bed are screwed to the 4x4s.  We'll see how well this all holds up.

Today I planted my first seeds and plants.  The plants are Swiss Chard.  Green smoothies are on their way.  I'm taking a bit of a chance, but went ahead and planted radishes and carrots.  I have divided the garden in to 1' squares (in my imagination, at least) and I am trying a modified version of square foot gardening.  So here is a long view of the first plantings.

And here I am, one happy gardener.  As any of you who try to grow a garden, you know that we could never do this unless we believed that hope springs eternal.

Mike