Today we finished getting the soil and bought a variety of things to plant. Soil is so heavy and it’s hard work to just get the amount of soil we bought into the beds (in total we used 16 bags of soil + 2 bags of a soil amendment). Each of our beds is 4 feet by 4 feet with a depth of just over 12 inches.
After unloading everything and getting the soil all set up, we went about putting the plants in. As you can see above, we got 4 different types of strawberry starters (Tri Star, Eversweet, Albion, and Seascape) – but whoops did we totally not realize just how many strawberry starters are in each container. We ended up taking 6 of each of them and filling up an entire raised bed – but we still had tons leftover! We messaged our neighbours who we’ve previously talked about gardening with to see if they wanted any so hopefully they won’t go to waste.
Planting the strawberries were really interesting. We had to dig decently far down so that we could put the roots in without them bending. We weren’t really sure what to do with fertilizer so we just like dumped some in the hole and mixed it in with the soil. Guess we’ll see what happens lol.
After we finished with the strawberries, we began the second raised bed where we are planting a lot of other things. We did two rows of different types of lettuce seeds. Planting lettuce is pretty interesting – you basically just use your finger to make line in the soil, plop the seeds and some fertilizer in, and then lightly push the soil back on top. Hopefully some of them germinate!
Other than the lettuce, we also planted some onions, scallions, garlic, and chives. For the onions, we basically just had like little bulb starters that we stuck in the ground (as you can tell we have no idea what we’re doing but just trying things). The other plants we just spaced out as was suggested and did much of the same.
Once we finished up those raised beds, we decided to take the strawberry starters and just plant some in random spots throughout our yard to see if any grow. I’m not expecting much from those but it’s fun to experiment anyway.
You may have noticed in the original photo of all the plants that there’s two bigger ones still in pots not pictured above. We decided to get some blueberry plants – but due to state laws, we have to have someone come out and mark the gas lines on our property before we can dig a hole to put those blueberries in. Photos and more to come for that in future weeks.
Overall today was a lot of fun – albeit a lot of hard work. I’m tentatively hopeful that at least some of our plants will work out ^_^