New Beginnings: How We Built Our Vegetable Garden

 

This is my husband, Dylan, faithfully doing one of the not so fun duties of dog ownership in the spot where our future vegetable garden would be. Could I have found a better "before" picture? Certainly. But this one has character. 

Back in December 2021, we bought our first home on 1/3 of an acre in the suburbs of Jacksonville, Florida, and spent the first year focusing on indoor projects and getting to know the yard. Coming from renting a townhome previously, we had a big learning curve with maintaining our St. Augustine grass lawn, identifying existing landscaping plants and weeds, figuring out where our irrigation was, learning how much light our yard gets at different times of the year, etc. 

Finally, in March of this year, after a lot of deliberation and research, we started the task of putting in the framework of our garden beds. We wanted something that would be cost effective and not too labor-intensive, as we both work full time. 

To start, we mapped out the dimensions of our garden beds. From our research, we found that 4x8 foot garden beds would work well, with 2 foot walkways to accommodate my little green garden cart. We did a little bit of improvising with what we had on hand, and marked out the space with string and plastic forks. 

We settled on raised garden beds to save us the trouble of having to remove the St. Augustine grass and to give us the opportunity to grow in better quality soil rather than our sandy, Myakka soil. We had been saving our moving boxes for a year just for this purpose-- cardboard is a great weed block. We laid out cardboard for the area of the beds to suppress the St. Augustine grass and make sure it died after we layered our beds, soil, and mulch on top of it. We wet the cardboard down thoroughly so it would form to the ground (fair warning that we learned: the cardboard tends to warp after being soaked). 

On March 7th, we had 2.5 cubic yards of soil delivered by Mulch Masters; it was a lot of soil to move to our backyard. We used buckets, an old trash can, shovels, and the garden cart to get the soil where we needed it to go.

Then, we piled it on top of the cardboard roughly where the garden beds would be. (In retrospect, we would have built the frame of our beds first, but live and learn!)

Initially, we were leaning towards creating the frame of our garden beds with cinder blocks, because they were cost effective and wouldn't break down in Florida rain and humidity. However, one visit to the hardware store had us rethinking that given the weight of the cinder blocks and the amount of trips back and forth we would have had to take to not overload our SUV. While walking around the store, we saw this display, and it gave us the inspiration for our garden bed design:

We ended up purchasing these corner blocks so that we wouldn't have to do much assembly for the beds, along with 2x6x8 foot untreated pine boards like these for the frame itself. We had the boards for the short edges of the beds cut down to size at the hardware store, brought everything home, and set up our framework around the soil. (In retrospect, I would have oiled or treated the wood boards first with a nontoxic treatment, just to protect them a bit from weathering so quickly-- there are some treatment ideas here). Then, we went back to the hardware store and bought about 20 bags of cypress mulch-- we now know there are more eco-friendly alternatives, and we found this mulch to break down very quickly. We have since gone for pine straw when topping up mulch around the beds more recently. 

We laid down the mulch around the beds, then added plastic edging. We learned two lessons here: 1. edge first from now on, and 2. St Augustine grass laughs in the face of shallow plastic edging. The edging has since been replaced. 

We finished the project on March 13th, just 6 days after the soil was delivered; we're very proud of it, and have since grown so many wonderful fruits and veggies in these beds.