Step 4: Designing the Garden
I have dirt, mulch, and a hole in the ground surrounded by a green fence. So now I need to design the garden!
My original intent was to do a 10×8 corn section, and five 1 ft horizontal rows of various vegetables in my garden. So to start, I used 70 feet of black landscape edging to line my hole. I just set it into the hole, and staked it so it stayed put. The dirt I later used to fill in the garden holds the edging in place. Then I began marking off the areas I wanted to plant veggies in, using black garden edging. I bought plenty of extra stakes for this process, and I had a good mallet for getting the stakes in.
When I actually began laying everything out I realized I needed my paths to be closer to 18 inches wide (vs the 12 I originally allowed for) so that I had adequate room to maneuver between rows. When I did this, I realized that horizontal rows didn’t fit right. So I switched it over to an 8×8 section of corn, and 5 vertical rows that vary between 8.5 and 10 feet long, depending on the location. I also added spots for the 2 additional tomatoes Emily gave me. I did not install the rows very straight, even though I did my best with the tape measure, but they’re functional.
Now that the edging is set, the dirt got released! I emptied the 26-27 bags of topsoil in the walkways. Then I emptied the first 6 bags of garden soil into the planting sections. This led to about 2 inches of dirt everywhere. At this stage, I went and got about 8 wheelbarrow fulls of mulch from my driveway. Mulch is great because weeds have a difficult time growing through it. I emptied the mulch on the walkways, which raised them up another 2-3 inches. I pulled the edging up a few inches, and filled the planting sections with the remaining garden soil. In the end, there is about 4-5 inches of soil/mulch everywhere.
Within 36 hours,my garden went from “unsightly hole in the lawn” to “GARDEN!”.
Garden and Gears 