I hate mowing grass, but I do enjoy working in the yard on flowers, shrubberies, and vegetables. My big gardening project this spring is rebuilding my vegetable garden. While I’ve had some pretty good harvests of Chinese long beans and cucumbers every year, maintaining the old garden was a pain. It was was lined with low, ground-hugging bricks, which didn’t do much to keep out weeds. One of my biggest problems during the growing season the last several years has been clearing away overgrown grass that engulf my vegetable vines. This task is made doubly hard by the fact that the old vegetable garden was built right up against the fence between my yard and the neighbor’s, meaning I can’t get on the other side to get rid of weeds on that side.

Two weekends ago, we built a small, raised, stone bed for tomatoes. That went pretty well and got my landscaping juices flowing. So this past weekend, we bought some wood boards and a few bags of soil and compost and set about redoing the entire vegetable garden. I started with digging up the bricks that formed the old one, then leveling the ground. The frames for the new beds were pretty easy to make — just drill a few holes on each board and hammer in a few nails to join them in a rectangle. We put the frames flat on the ground, covered the existing soil inside with a couple layers of newspapers to kill some of the old grass, and dumped soil, compost, and mulch on top. The new beds are about a foot and a half away from the fence, just enough room for me to get behind them to easily weed and harvest vegetables.

We christen one of our new beds with zucchini seedlings, though we planted them way too close together. We’ll have to do some transplanting this week. We planted 12 seedlings in a 2-by-6 bed, only to find out later in the day that you should leave three to four feet between each plant. Oops!