It’s been almost two years since I’ve written a Blog post here at FreeYouNow.com.
I’ve been primarily focused on working on my tabletop gaming business and that hasn’t really left me with a lot of time to do any blogging.
However, today I decided to write a post on here about a new project I’m going to be embarking on – starting a veggie garden.
To be honest, I don’t really know why I’m being so inspired to start a veggie garden this spring, as I have more than enough on my plate right now with my businesses, but for whatever reason I’m just super excited to start a garden.
I’ve been doing a lot of research in the past week or so on various possible setups for a veggie garden in my back yard.
In the past I’ve setup a hydroponic setup for growing vegetables, which was on-track and doing well until one day a power outage/spike broke my lighting timer in my grow tent and at that time I was also super busy with work and I didn’t check on my plants for a few days and of course since they had no light at all for a few days they all died.
It was a mistake on my part, trusting a digital timer which up to that point had been working flawlessly, compounded by my busy schedule and me not checking in on my system for a few days.
One day I may go back and give hydroponics another try, but for now I’m really inspired to setup a garden outside where I’ll have a lot more room to grow veggies and also where the sun will rise every morning and not be dependent on a digital timer. 🙂
I’m still very much in the research and planning phases of this project, but I’m a huge believer in diving in and getting started with SOMETHING when excited about a new project, so as a starting point I’m starting with two things:
1) Starting Off Seedlings
The first thing I did is I picked up a Jiffy Pro Greenhouse starter kit for starting off seedlings.
I still had a bunch of seeds from my hydroponic garden so I picked 9 different types of seeds and did four “pods” for each type of veggie:
- Cauliflower
- Zucchini
- Radishes
- Caesar Lettuce
- Mixed Greens
- Green Onions
- Red Peppers
- Cucumbers
- Beets
Now, I know I still have to go back and research each of those veggies and I’m not even sure if any of them will sprout as the seeds are a few years old, but I figured I’d get something started and see how it goes.
I got the seedlings all setup now, sitting on a warming mat, so hopefully within the next week or so we’ll see something happen.
2) Getting Cedar for a Raised Bed Setup
I decided to go with a raised bed setup for my garden.
There are a few reasons for this, but primarily it was a decision between building a fenced off area for my garden that the dogs won’t trample over, or building raised beds which are tall enough for the dogs not to get into.
If I was to build a fence and fence in a portion of my yard and dedicate it to a veggie garden, then I would just use small raised garden boxes that are 8′ x 4′ by 6″ tall.
However, I decided to instead build 8′ x 4′ x 24″ tall raised beds which hopefully won’t require me to have a fence, but which later on could easily be split apart into the smaller 8′ x 4′ x 6″ tall beds if I do end up building a fence.
So I’m just going to start with the taller raised beds and then I can always break them down into smaller pieces later if needbe.
For my first prototype for the box I picked up a bunch of 2×6 x8′ red cedar planks as well as a few 4×4 x8′ for the corner pieces.
For the actual box design, I’m thinking of doing something like this:
If you guys would like to see progress updates on this project, leave a comment and let me know and I’ll try to do some updates as I go along with the project.
-Paul
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