Building a Mebourne Veggie Patch: Setting up a square Foot Gardening

KEY LEARNING'S

Need better organization

Need to be better at cultivating from seeds

Need to sort out the ph balance of my soil

NEW THINGS I HAVE TRIED

Bought the "square foot garden" book

DIARY COMMENT

My garden has produced a few items so far

A small qty of green beans
3 large pots of rocket
3 basil plants (lasted 6 months)
A few spring onions
A few garlic plants
2 Silver beet (very small at the moment)

But failed to produce quite allot. I thought it was time to take stock. Part of that was to measure the pH of my soil however my planting has been sporadic and my success planting from seeds has been pretty poor (nearly all died).

-Square Foot Gardening

I bought the book square foot garden the other day and it looks pretty good. I hope it will give my garden a routine and structure - it's all been a bit messy and ad-hoc up until now.

-Killing off My beds

The beans I grew earlier in the year have stopped producing beans and the beds are filled with weeds (this was due in part tom my random way I planted which meant I was never sure if the green shoots were weeds or what I had planted).

I thought it was a good time to kill off the beans and reorganise things along the lines of the square foot garden. I covered all my beds with newspaper and then poured soil onto in.

BEFORE

From Garden 5/07/09 2:29 PM

AFTER

BED C JULY 2009

I have also marked out with string approximate 1 foot squares. Once I have read a bit more I will then start planting.

The soil I poured on is a mix of mulched leaves (that had been in a bin bag since January). 8 bags of star-bucks coffee, and the rest (which would be about 60% by volume) was compost from my heap that has been composting since January and the newest addition was about 1 month ago).