2020 Outdoor Vegetable Garden

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This is the year of Sars-Cov-2, so while encouragingly there are alot of novice gardeners taking up the call to become more sustainable, we, unfortunately are unable to find seeds for our garden crops. This put a serious hinderance on our growing season, but it also allows us to make changes we want to our garden.  Changes which we had talked about but had procrastinated.  So without further ado, here are some of the changes made. Hopefully the changes will pay off for next year.  Here is to a better year in 2021.  

One of the first changes we made in 2020:

We changed the main vegetable garden from mulch to gravel. It seems as if it is a waste of resources; however, the mulch in the garden was more then 4 years old and had turned to really nice topsoil which was very hard to weed. By changing to gravel, we cut down on weeding, weeds which grow are easy to remove and it also cuts down on any potential costs which we would encur muching every year. Win-Win.

Bottom to Top: The progression of the gravel beginning, as well as the beginnings of new boxes. a 6X8 and a 3X6

Moving on to the next…

The Final Product and our feeble attempt to grow what we are able to during the 2020 Season:

In the boxes:
Left side, bottom to top: Tomato, Peppers (hot and bell), Dragon Radish, Broccoli, Cucumbers
Right Side, bottom: summer squash, winter squash and spaghetti squash.
In the back of the garden we added 2 new boxes. The larger of the two, the 6X8 was placed on top of a large tree root system from a maple we had to cut down due to blight. Not much is expected to grow out of it this year, but if I can get some plants in it to at least root a little, it will add nitrogen to the soil.
We also added a box in the back specificially for corn. While this may seem counterproductive considering that it will reach for the sun and grow crooked, there are a series of other root systems from trees surrounding the yard that make it almost impossible to grow anything with a deep root structure. With corn having a shallow structure, it makes it a good spot.