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planting the veggie garden

One of the pluses of owning a house that I was really looking forward to was having a backyard big enough for a vegetable garden. My parents have always had a huge garden back home and I always ate fresh peas, corn and tomatoes growing up.

The first spring of owning my home, Aaron and I broke the dirt for a little four square veggie garden. Here is how it went.

I planned out the garden first. I plotted out what vegetable I wanted to grow and where they would go. I planned on beefsteak tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, plum tomatoes and grape tomatoes, lettuce, carrots, radishes, onions, peas, beans, watermelon, basil, peppers and cucumbers.

Since the garden would be a big part of my yard, I wanted it to look nice. I got white wire edging and plant markers to make it look more organized.

First we laid out the edging to get an idea of how big the garden should be and Aaron marked it off with flour.

It took a long time to cut through the grass and sod. We moved it to a patch of yard that didn't have grass because we cut down a bush.

Each night we did a different square of the garden, digging up the sod, mixing in more topsoil and fertilizer before digging our rows and planting the seeds. I planted marigolds around the edge to add color and help keep away critters.

Everyday I would run out to the garden to see what had most recently sprouted.

I bought one of those copper sprinklers that spins around when you turn it on. It's shaped like a dragon fly and really gets the whole garden soaked.

Bit by bit the plants got bigger and bigger. I learned which veggies worked best in our soil and which ones I really used more. We used every single cucumber, but the beans went uneaten. The lettuce flourished, but the peppers did poorly.

By mid summer the garden was really flourishing. To see the veggies that I got from the garden see pictures of the harvest.