Urban Gardening at its Finest

A few weeks ago, Heather decided that we should really take our 'buy local' mindset to the next level and start 'buying' veggies out of our own backyard. In other words, we needed a garden!

Only one problem--we don't own the yard where we live.

But we do have a side porch, so we decided to do the next best thing; build a planter where we could plant veggies.

Check out the pictures of our progress!

We measured our porch and decided that 6 feet by 3 feet would be a good start, did a little thinking about what we would need, then headed to Lowe's. After a little bit of first-time-home-improvement stumbling around the lumber yard, we decided to go with 8 feet x 3 feet because the lumber we liked came in a nice 8 foot length. A few other supplies later, such as a hand saw and some nails and we were piling the lumber in our car (it almost didn't fit!).


Back at home, armed with a hammer and some nails, we got to work. A little hammering later and we had a box!


A couple of weeks later we bought our dirt and started planting. Note to self--learn to calculate cubic feet; the guy in the gardening section told us we needed twice as much dirt for our planter as we actually did. Luckily, we bought two less bags than he recommended, but we still have two extra bags we'll have to put to use a little later in the season.


In our bed we planted parsley, basil, sugar snap peas, cucumbers, and yellow squash. We have some lettuce, beets, and zucchini that we didn't have room to plant, but we're going to buy a few round planters that we can put some other veggies in once the weather gets a bit warmer.


Finally we enclosed our new planter with some plastic fencing to hopefully keep our landlord's dog at bay. We decided to move the planter off the porch because we were worried about the water collecting under the planter and harming the deck and hopefully that was a good choice because its so heavy we'll never get it back up there!


With some daily watering and some sunshine (hopefully the minimal sun we get in Syracuse is sufficient), we should start to see some growth in a few short weeks!