Vegetable Gardening Part 1

I have lived in Austin 3.5 years, and Michael has lived in Austin for 7.5 years. We have been slowly acclimating ourselves into the "Austin Lifestyle" as I like to call it. You know, being more aware of organic/natural ways of doing things, getting excited about gardening, going local with buying things, etc (the list could go on and on). The culture here is pretty diverse, and we love it. So these past 2 weekends (rain and bad weather prevented it from being just 1 weekend), we have embraced the idea of home vegetable gardening. Pretty fun, I know. I have been doing a bunch of research, and we are both hoping that this works out and that we end up having at least a couple of successful plants. I won't set my hopes too high and expect everything to grow well. But I sure won't complain if it does.
We decided that the best way to do this for our yard was to make raised beds. So off to Lowe's we went to get a couple of 2x8's, cut them, and made a bed that is 2.5 feet by 5 feet, and a smaller one for asparagus next to it.

We went down the road to this gardening place called It's about Thyme (cute name huh?), and talked to a really nice man named Dwight who was very very helpful. They have an area of several raised bed gardens at this place and he showed us how they did theirs, and gave us lots of tips on how to make our garden succesful. He also recommended that we buy our soil and compost from another place in Austin called The Natural Gardener because it only cost $3 a bag there. Thanks Dwight!! Based on some of his recommendations, we decided to make a line of several beds and grow a grouping of things in each one.
This stage is only part one because its just the "starter" bed. Here's what we have accomplished:
1. Finalize our plans and get the beds built
2. Prep half of the beds which included digging up existing soil and mix in good soil and compost
3. Plant the veggies that are ok to plant this early while still cold (carrots, asparagus, broccoli, and lettuce)
4. Figure out a plan for keeping the dogs away from the garden!


So I think we have made a pretty good start, this is how the yard looks right now:

From Left to Right: broccoli, carrots(in the blank space) and 2 types of lettuce

Asparagus bed (this has to be by itself and will take 2 years to grow)

Hopefully this will keep the pups out!

I thought I would add a few bonus pictures of our suuuper awesome dirt from The Natural Gardener. Man that place is so cool. The day we went was very cold and we were going as fast as we could b/c we needed 15 bags of dirt and 5 bags of compost, so we didn't have time to go exploring. As soon as we have some nice weather and a free Saturday though, I want to go back and look at all their fun stuff! (in case you didn't see the link above, here is how to get to their website to see a little of what I am talking about: http://naturalgardeneraustin.com/).

mmm compost

Michael working hard to load up the dirt

Coming soon: part 2!