New garden addition, "Grow Camp"

I am sooo excited! My husband & I completed assembling the new addition to our garden. We bought it online at Costco and it is called a Grow Camp. Basically it is a bottomless box with an attached frame that has plastic film on each end and mesh screen fabric attached at the top that is attached with velcro along the sides and across the bottom of the sides. It also came with plastic film that is also attached at the top and fits over the screen and is also attached with velcro along the sides and bottom. I am posting some pictures. It assembled easily enough. We just had to make sure we were attaching things facing the correct way. It is easy to assemble things backwards. Once it was up, I decided to get some dirt and use it as a covred raised bed. It took a LOT of soil, 30 bags plus a whole garden cart full of compost. And it could really use more! I planted some cucumbers, parsely, red cabbage so far. I may remove the red cabbage since the book says it takes up a lot of room. I think the cucumbers will like it! I'll probably plant some peppers, since they like nice warm conditions. I stuck my transplanted seedlings out there too, just placing them in trays on top of the soil for now. They sell planting trays for the Grow Camp. I will probably order some of those, since you can hang them from the cross braces to form a shelf above the plants in the soil. I love it! I am hoping to extend my growing season and have peppers and root veggies long into the fall.

April,2010

The play, "Beauty & the Beast" was a huge success. Three sold out performances! The cast and crew were wonderful. Now that the rehearsal frenzy is over and the weather is better, it's time to get the garden ready. Yesterday was a warm, dry day after almost a week of rain, rain, and more rain! Our heavy clay soil just holds that moisture and it takes time to drain. I was able to clean up our side flower garden and the raised beds. Thank goodness for those raised beds. I have been building them over the years, since we have a yard full of boulders that we can't budge. So... the solution was to use them as borders and build up the soil around them to make the raised beds. With our heavy soil, it works! I planted asparagus in one bed. Today I will plant lettuce, spinach and chard. I also harvested a whole bucket of Jerusalem artichokes from the bed I was preparing for the asparagus. They just multiply! There are still many areas of the garden where they grow every year.