In the Garden

I recently overhauled my large side yard and installed all new raised beds for a total 112 square feet of gardening space.  My complete start up expenses have been:

$160 wood and hardware for beds
$330 soil, delivery and spreading (this was a mistake…the soil I got was NOT good)
$120 on starts and seeds
$110 additional soil and worm castings
$90 drip system set up
$35 fertilizer and pest control
$125 fencing and gate

= $970

$970 is a lot, but we spread the project out over about two months, and had set money aside in the few months that we were getting the space ready, so we were able to spread it out over time.

Some of the expenses were optional, and some of the costs could easily be reduced depending on your situation.

I do feel like we paid too much for the bulk compost/soil based on how much we got and the quality, but live and learn.  I think the price we paid would have been fair, had the soil been what it was sold as.

The starts are a luxury…that expense could be avoided.  Seeds are cheap and you don’t need to spend a lot on special seed starting equipment if you plan well.

The drip system is optional and could also be avoided.

Beds can be built from less expensive (or even free lumber) but it was very important to my husband for our’s to be uniform.

Fencing is only needed if you have animals or kids that will mess up your hard work.

We’ll still need to spend around $100-200 to install supports and shade cloth next summer, because gardening through some of our hotter months is important to me.

Continue to Part 4 for ideas of what to plant if you live in the greater-Phoenix area like I do!

As I mentioned in Part 1, I started out trying to amend in-ground beds in my own backyard, and had issues with plants dying and/or not growing.  The previous owner had used pavers to outline a veggie garden area, but when we bought the house, everything she’d planted was very small and very dead.  We ripped all that out, added dozens of bags of soil and compost over two years and still couldn’t get things going.  I never had the “soil” officially tested but I concluded that there must be something in the ground that is not conducive to any sort of growth.

I decided to switch to 100% raised beds so I could have more control over the soil.  I took a full spring/summer off to overhaul that area of the yard, and it was worth it, being able to implement the new plan slowly over several months. It’s a more costly option since you have to (1) build or buy the beds and (2) completely fill them with purchased soil.  We started out by removing the paver border and then leveled the area (which is our side yard).  We carefully chose a spot for the new beds, where they would get enough sun in the fall/winter and some decent shade in the spring/summer.  We left room to plant fruit trees and some vining plants along the block fencing.  We have a bay window in the our formal dining room that faces the side yard, and I really want to eventually look out into green space and not just crushed granite and block fencing!

We built six beds.  They are four feet by four feet, and 8″ tall.  Two of them have a two feet by four foot second tier, because I wanted some deeper areas for root veggies.  We settled on pine common boards from Home Depot because they were cost effective.  We chose the 2x10s and used 2x4s to anchor the corners to the ground, so leveling would be easier and so we would not have to worry about shifting.  The beds are situated in our east side yard, which gets enough sun for a fall/winter garden, and some decent shade for spring/summer (we will be installing shade cloth for the hottest months).  We put down several layers of cardboard on top of thick layers of crushed granite, in hopes that whatever IS in the soil would not leach into the new beds.

Filling the beds was a bit tricky.  Not having a pick-up truck or a vehicle capable of driving a long distance with a trailer full of hundreds of pounds of dirt, we found someone to deliver what was touted as very high quality composted soil.  Unfortunately, we were shorted on amount and also discoverd areas that are very sandy, loamy and just not that great.  We began ammending with bagged compost and soil, and will likely need to continue amending for some time to come.

Watering is a consideration. I’ve always watered by hose, but especially in the summer, that is hard to keep up and can be wasteful and not-so-great for the plants.  We set up drip irrigation to the hose bib near the garden.  This included an inexpensive manual timer (I go outside, turn on the water and set the time, then return to shut off the water…the timer cuts it off but we have a couple leaks if we leave the faucet on) which I’d like to upgrade someday to a completely automatic one.   My starts are doing very well so far with the drip set-up and while we’ve had kinks to work out, I think it’s worth the money to set it up and maintain it.

I purchased a lot of starts, because we finished a bit late for seeds for most of the plants I wanted.  I’m glad I did plant starts because it helped me quickly discover some of the shortcomings of our soil blend.

The last major component has been a 42″ high picket fence, to keep our dogs out.  Our 75# standard poodle can more than destroy a garden in moments…in years past I’ve tried smaller garden borders and they don’t work well ~ he’s destroyed a LOT of plants each year.  Both dogs will dig in the richly-aromatic soils we use and they will poop near/on plants as well.  We purchased three 8′ long picket fence panels, a gate hardware kit and a few posts, plus a bag of concrete to create the barrier.  I still need to sand it a bit and paint it, but I’m not factoring paint into the cost.

Continue to Part 3, for a complete cost break down.

I love to garden. I’m not very good at it still, but I like the idea of being able to grow some of the fruits and veggies we eat.  Especially our favorites.  Organic is just too expensive typically, but I can grow organic in my backyard pretty easily and inexpensively.  This series will chronical my experiences, successes and failures gardening near Phoenix, AZ.

You have a few options starting out in backyard/urban gardening.

The first is to create garden beds in your native soil, right in the ground.  Depending on where you live, and what’s been happening in your yard pre-garden, you might not even have to amend the soil much.  Near Phoenix, we typically need to amend at about 2/3…i.e. 1/3 native soil, 1/3 ‘good’ soil and 1/3 worm castings/compost/coconut coir and other amendments.  The second option is raised beds, which can be more costly, since you have to buy/build the beds and then purchase all of the soil/compost to fill them.  A third option is small containers, which is a great option for apartment dwellers and can be kept on patios and moved in and out of the sun (you might even have success growing inside near windows).  Our first summer in our home, I grew all my peppers and tomatoes in 5 gallon buckets outside and moved them around as needed.  I had trouble keeping them moist during the hottest parts of the summer, but overall I had decent yields, even if birds stole a lot of them.  I also spent over two years trying to grow a garden in heavily amended native soil, to no avail, so I switched to 100% raised beds in the fall of 2016.

For more details and cost break-downs for different methods of getting started, see part 2.