Creating a Plot Garden

 Raised beds and containers have always been my way of gardening. There were definitely pros and cons. It was great on my back, looked pretty and did pretty well. The raised beds were made out of wood and wasps ended up finding a way in and building nests. I didn't have enough room for even half of what I wanted to plant. Now that has all changed!!

Here is some of that beautiful grass. Someday I would like our yard to all work together to produce food and useful items for us and livestock. The first step is a garden! 

To start, we called around to our local hardware stores and rented a sod cutter. This heavy machine has a blade that digs down however deep you set it (within reason, it isn't going to dig to the Earths core) and separates the grass and soil from the earth. 

Here is a picture of one that can be rented through Home Depot. They are heavy, but worth it! 

It only took one afternoon to cut the sod that I wanted cut. It took longer to move the pieces. Warning...the sod is heavy! We put pieces on a saucer sled and pulled it with a rope to move. This was great, it allowed the kids to help too! We didn't have a plan of what to do with the sod so we kind of piled it off to the side. In that moment, I had an idea!!

Some of the sod got moved to make walls for a temporary compost pile...what?!?!?!  

This was the start of it. We did build up the sides a little more. The idea was that we will add our composting items, and eventually the dirt and sod will break down too. So far, one year later, it's worked really well! 

The rest of the sod is still piled next to this. I still haven't figured out what to do. There are two options that I am going back and forth with.

 Option one ~ A mound garden bed or a Hugelkultur garden.

If you haven't heard of this, I will have an upcoming post and will put the link here. In the meantime, google! 

Option two ~ Start building a large berm to shoot arrows at with the bow and to shoot guns at.

Our neighbor has one of these and if done right, it can be safe and a really enjoyable pastime! At the last house, our son hit our siding a few times with an arrow...oops!!! 

Realistically, we will probably go for mound gardening. Okay... so back on the garden plots now that we know what to do with the soil and sod. 

So here we have some plots that are grass free! 

I wish I would have taken more pictures, but we did two large plots and two small plots. The small plots are intended to be for strawberries and blueberries. I did plant strawberries, but they did not flourish. I'll try again this year! 

Two big plots gave me the opportunity to really plant what I want to plant and also have plenty of room to rotate plants every year. Because I still have a lot to learn, I really wanted the space to learn on! 

My hobbies have the support of my husband, but to keep that support, I try to save money when ever I can. We have a one income household I cannot be spending money we don't have on my garden and farming dreams. One thing I did to save money that first year was use branches instead of a trellis or tomato cages. This actually worked really well! 

I found sticks and bound them together with twine. There are groups of three on each end and a group of two in the middle. I then wrapped twine around for the plants to grow up on and tied the tomato plants to keep them up to the top branches. 

The next decision was to till or not to till. The dirt seemed healthy and I was worried about tilling up bug larvae, weeds and grass seeds. The ground is SO hard though! I went with a partial till. I only tilled what I absolutely needed to till. I did not till too deep either. For plants that needed to be planted deeper, I dug deeper under the tilled soil. The only place this didn't work out to well was for some of the root veggies. I should have gone deeper for the beets and the carrots. 

This shows the tilled rows a little and some seedlings planted from last year! This year I plan on doing the same thing, just tilling where I need to till and leaving the rest alone. I will add sand to the spots that I do the root vegetables though. 

Tell me your wins and fails! Do you like garden plots or are you partial to raised beds or containers? Has anyone done a mound garden? I can't wait to find out :)