Makin' garden beds

When you make garden beds from scratch, in a place where there have never been garden beds before – or at least not in any recent history – there is quite a process to go through to turn plain old ground into a nice, fluffed up, level bed. It's what we are spending a lot of time doing right now, and here's what the process looks like at our place:

1. Set up stakes to mark the corners of the bed. Our beds are 4' wide and 50' long, and in the first row of the garden, we will have 27 beds going up the gently sloped hillside. We stake out 50' up the hill at a time, which works out to 10 beds that have a 1' path in between each one.
2. We then tie string around the 4 corners of one bed, with a knotted loop for each stake that can easily be shifted to the next bed up the hill when we're ready. The string lines show us where the edges of the bed are along the length of it, so the bed stays 4' wide the whole way.
3. Next, we pick any visible rocks off the top of the bed, filling up plastic pots and dumping them into a nearby wheelbarrow. When the wheelbarrow gets pretty full, we roll it down the driveway (what we call “the lane”), and use the rocks to fill potholes. That will be a never-ending job, so it's a good thing there are so many rocks at our disposal...
4. Back at the garden bed, we hoe up the top few inches of soil to loosen it up, turn the weeds over, and pick out more rocks.
5. At this point, we might leave the bed alone either for a few hours or until the next day, to let the newly-exposed soil dry a bit. Then, we hoe it again, to break up big clumps of soil, and pull the soil in various directions as needed to level the bed. There are quite a few hummocks in our garden area, so there's a fair bit of pulling soil from the high spots to the low spots.
6. We switch to a metal rake (the kind with the hard tines, not the floppy ones used for raking leaves) and do a little more breaking up of clumps and fine-tuning the level of the bed. The rake usually exposes a few more rocks too.
7. At this point, we have a pretty, raised bed, and we then plant seeds or transplant greens from the greenhouse. When we are planting squash, we don't usually bother with the raking stage, as the squash are placed pretty far apart and a little bit of lumpiness won't affect them.

With 27 beds in the first row, we plan to cover crop every other row, because we need to start creating large amounts of compost. This is such an experimental year, as we don't really know how much food to grow to feed ourselves, so the plan is to plant out just about all the seeds we have (and we have a LOT of seeds) and see where that gets us. For example, we have planted 100' of potatoes, made up of about 10 different varieties, for a total of 200 potatoes in the ground (plus another 10 or so in the greenhouse that will be our early potatoes, as some of them are already flowering). We have this idea that we will get to the second row of 27 beds, but with fighting the black flies, doing other things around the farm and taking care of Oliver, it might be a while before we get there. Those beds may be almost exclusively cover crops, or the 2^nd or 3^rd planting of something we've already planted in the first row, to give us later season veggies. As of this writing, we are up to Bed 18 in the first row (what we're calling Row A), but we have skipped most of the cover crop rows for now. We have been starting with the veggie beds and getting those planted as we complete them, because now that it's early June, it's time to get seeds in the ground. Making beds takes time, and we're usually only able to get one completed each day. We managed to get two done the other day, when that was the only thing we focused on that day.

The lettuce, kale and chard transplants that came out of the greenhouse are looking good, but unfortunately the spinach wasn't too happy with transplanting and went to seed.