The beginning

It all started with an article in the 'Home & Garden' section in the Mercury News on October 3. I normally skip this section in the newspaper but for some reason I read it that night. It was an article about how in Santa Clara County, where I live, you can have up to 3 seasons to grow vegetables, with now being a good time to start planting 'cool season' vegetables.

There you go, this is what got me interested. For some reason I thought, 'why not make this a little project and grow my own vegetables' ? Now, apart from some plants I had grown while I was a student back in Germany... I have never ever grown anything outdoors. As a matter of fact, I consider myself a complete ignoramus when it comes to knowledge about vegetables, flowers or plants (evident in the fact that I get funny looks when I ask my wife's aunt, who is a farmer, about basic things like when to harvest corn or how does wheat look like etc.).

But here I was, on a Saturday night in California, coming up with a new hobby after reading my local newspaper.

The article had a link to a very good website (mastergardeners.org) which I was checking out right away. I even created a Google doc in which I listed all vegetables that one can grow during fall/winter. That info was again copied from the mastergardener website.

So now I knew what I wanted to plant, I figured I would start with something I and my family would eat, so decided on broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce and chard (the chard was later dropped as I could not find it in the store, plus I had to look it up in the dictionary to know what it actually is...).

The next question was: where do I plant those vegetables ?

I think this was mentioned in the news article, but I figured that a raised vegetable garden might be best. Best because the soil in our garden is pretty crappy (my wife tried to grow tomatoes with limited success). I then used the help of my employer to find out more about raised vegetable gardens and quickly found a ready made solution that would perfectly fit my needs. The only catch was that it would come at a fairly hefty price...

What I found was the 'Frame it All Vegetable garden'. Particular the 8x4 garden which came at a hefty 230 bucks though...

I spend that evening and the following Sunday morning to find out where to buy that stuff. On Sunday morning I even called some local stores (Sears, Osh, some local garden centers) only to find out that they would only sell the 4 feet by 4 feet version which I found too small, and that the larger version was only available online. However, I did not want to wait a week until its delivered (call me obsessed at this stage...) so decided to go to one of the local stores (Osh in Sunnyvale) which I knew at least that they had the 4x4 version in stock and that I could take a look and take it from there.... Isn't it funny that depite most stuff being onlne these days, there is often enough the scenario where you either (a) want to see the phsyical good or (b) you want it right away and not wait for delivery later...

Anyway, me going to the store was the best thing that could happen to me, as it shifted my little soon-to-be-starting hobby from a fairly effortless order-all-online to one that eventually become a full DIY job which involved sawing lumber into its propper size, using a power drill and various other tools !

What happened ? I asked one of the sales people whether they would sell the pieces of the frame it all separately too so I could maybe build a bigger one than the 4x4 and he said no. However, he pointed me to the lumber and hardware section of the store and said that I could probably build the whole thing myself for much cheaper: basically he suggested instead of buying this shiny Porsche version for 80$ I could do it myself for the prices of a case of beer ! He even told me what I needed (lumber planks, a few brackets and screws and put it all together...)

I thanked him for the advice and went to the mentioned isle 16 of the store to find out that indeed I could build it all myself for less than 20 bucks, which made me think 'why not build a bigger.... ?'

At that point, I knew I could not do it all myself in half a day, not me having very little experience in doing DIY with the biggest thing I ever build being a rack for our first daughter to fit her nappies and other stuff (which by the way still exists so I guess I am not that badm I wouldn't trust it with heavy stuff on it either though....)

Since it was already Sunday afternoon at this point, I decided to take a day off the following week to do it all properly. This also gave me some time to do some more research on both how to build the stuff right: for example, did you know that there are thousands of videos on youtube that explain the Ins and Outs of vegetable gardens...? For example I watched this and this and some others).

Next I realized my biggest expense would probably be the soil I needed for the garden (again I could not use the one we had in the garden as it was pretty bad). So next I checked craigslist to see if I can get soil cheap somewhere (yes, this stuff can get pretty expensive when you have to buyiver 20 cubic feet !). While there were quite few people that sold soil or even gave it for free, in the end I did buy it in the gardening store though as I was able to get the square foot for around 2.5$ and figured good soil is important for a good yield.

So the following Friday, October 8th I went to a local Lowe's with my yougest daughter while my wife was at home with the older one. I spend probably a coupe of hours in the store to buy the following:

• 8 lumber planks, 6 feet long for ~2 $ each
• 2 sets of corbner brackets (~4$ each)
  
• 1 set of mending brackets (~3$)
• 4 cf top soil for the ground
• 12 cf gardening soil for the middle
• 4 cubic feet compost for the top (someone in the first gardening center I went to that Sunday explained that this might be a good combination so I just went with it. Will let you know in a few weeks if this was a wise decision...)
• 9 plants broccoli (they come in 9-packs)
  
• 9 plants cauliflower
• 9 plants romain lettuce
• 9 plants head/iceburg lettuce

All of the above cost me only 90 bucks which I was very happy about so off I went with all of it back home. Here is how all of it looked before I loaded it into my car.



The next morning I got started fairly early for a Saturday to get this thing going. First I had to saw the planks into the right size. I decided to go with 6 by 4 foot. Miriam took this pic so it is a bit blurry.




This is how the garden/box looked after about 2 hours of work. You can see the metal brackets in the corners. I pre drilled the wholes with my power drill to ensure the wood would not split.



Next I had to put all the soil into the garden. Again, 4x 3cf bags and 8 1cf bags:



First put in the top soil:



Then the garden soil:



And finally the compost:



Next I separted the bed into 4 rows with 6 cells, each 1 foot apart so that I could plant 24 plants in total.



planted 6 plants of romaine lettuce in the first row, 6 head lettuce in the last row, and 6 each of broccoli and cauliflower in the middle rows. Even though the lettuce and cauliflower are supposed to be more than 1 foot apart from each other, I decided to stick with the 1 plant per 1 foot allotment but only future will tell whether that was a wide choice !

So this is it, my final product with its proud owner !



The next day on Sunday I went to the store again to buy some more brackets in order to make a small 2x2 feet mini garden for Julia and Miriam from the left over planks.



Hopefully growing vegetable will teach them to appreciate them more and actually eat them too... :) They were certainly proud and busy watering after we planted the vegetables:



We also placed some more plants into some pots that were not in use currently to use up as many of the plants we had bought.