When deciding how big a garden you need, 200 sq ft per person allows for enough harvest for everyone year-round. That meant we need 400 sq ft for us and we added another 100 sq ft for the chickens.
We decided on raised garden beds because our ground is full of rocks … anything from golf ball size to big boulders that the tractor could barely move. The thought of trying to dig 500 sq ft through rocks just wasn’t appealing. So raised beds it is!
First I designed the layout on graph paper.
Can I reach across the grow areas?
Is the garden situated on the property appropriately in relationship to everything else?
Once the grow beds were built we put up the PVC framework and attached poultry wire for the roof and walls. We didn’t use Hardware Cloth because the goal wasn’t to make it predator proof like the Hen House. We just need to deter the bunnies and birds from getting to the plants.
Before laying down soil, we first put Hardware Cloth in the bottom of the grow beds to prevent the ground squirrels from digging up from underneath. Then we put down a layer of weed prevention cloth and a layer of plain cardboard.
The gate was installed. The following few weeks was spent chasing mourning doves out of the garden … not an easy thing to do … as many as 10 in 1 week! The only thing I could figure is that they were walking in through the gap in the gate and then couldn’t find their way back out. So I took some scrap hardware cloth from Hen House and filled the gaps in the gate. We haven’t had any visitors inside since.
Then I took a copy of the original garden plan and started marking on it companion planting to figure out where each food item would best be placed.
And the planting began in October 2021.
It may seem like 9 months was a long time to get this completed but we only worked on it 1 day a week due our work schedules. We did all of the work ourselves. Some weeks we got rained out and couldn’t do any work. Other weeks during the summer when it was triple digit highs, we worked on it at night with lanterns to avoid the hottest part of the day. So it really only took about 6 weeks if we could have worked on it every day.
