Gardening In The City

I guess the best place to start is the layout of what I am trying to achieve. First off, I have been reading up on square foot gardening. Square Foot Gardening is a fairly new technique that is based on raised beds usually made of wood. The concept behind this is to create one foot squares for laying out your garden.

I am varying from this concept a little. I am using raised beds but not the square foot method. The average raised bed is ten to twelve inches but I am only using four as my soil is well tilled and I have this theory that I am hoping will work well for me.

Background Of How This All Got Started

My Wife, Son and I bought this house in the North East section of Philadelphia just about two years ago. It is a small house, only two bedrooms and a small back yard. The back yard measures 14’X14’ and was over grown with shrubs and rosebushes. We decided to take everything out and just have a lawn. We planted grass seed and it took pretty well until we started having backyard barbeque's. From the traffic we ended up with a sizable bald spot in the middle of the yard.

One thing I forgot to mention, 6’ out from the back of the house was a concrete walkway that was all cracked and broken in some spots. I got out the sledge hammer and started to break it away. As it turns out, living in the city, it is very difficult to get rid of the rubble so I came up with this idea to get rid of it.

After digging up the yard to get rid of the shrubs I decided to dig a little deeper and bury the rubble. Thinking of the drainage method used in container growing I thought this would be a help with drainage. As it turned out I was right on with my theory. The drainage in the yard is excellent. I basically designed a 14’X14’ flower pot.

The Garden

First of all we had a cat problem, As you can tell from the first picture we solved that problem by enclosing a 14’X7’ area. Right now the garden looks incomplete as there is still construction that needs to be done.

If you notice in the second picture you can see how I framed in the boxes and the walk area. I am going to raise to level with the tops of the frame terracotta pavers’ and brick. This should give the exact look that I am trying to achieve. I love the color of terracotta and green vegetation. The colors seem to blend quite well.

The Garden In Pictures

I will try to explain each picture as I go along.

The first two boxes you see are for bush type vegetables. The left box is for tomatoes. To the left of that you see a 1’ strip. That is for cherry tomatoes. The box to the right is for bell peppers. Behind it is another 1’ strip and I have already planted snow peas and snap peas. This strip is 7’ long and has two rows. As the peas start to grow I will thin them and hang a rope trellis. The boxes are 4’x2’ and 6” deep.

This next picture is the right side of the garden. We get the most sunlight to this end so I am planting vegetables that don’t grow as tall. Closest to the fence we have planted romaine lettuce and in the empty space I planted seed for Iceberg lettuce. The box to the left has spinach and the empty space is more Iceberg lettuce. The box you see to the bottom right is not planted yet. We are planning on Brussels sprouts and Cauliflower.

Notice the strip at the top of the picture, you can only see part of it here but it measures 12’ long and 1’ wide. In this space I planted string beans. The beans are spaced at 2” apart and later as they grow I will thin to about 6 to 8”. This should net a nice bunch of beans.

I made a video of the garden but for some reason the voice doesn’t match the film. The results are when I am talking about certain areas in the video, the video is somewhere else. Maybe next time I will make a new one.

Until the next time!