Lots to plant!

We made a trip to the beautiful Sperling Nursery to get everything besides tomatoes (which we had already gotten at the Tomatomania sale):

We got herb and pepper and berry and veggie plants, as well as a bunch of seeds (carrots and lettuce and beets....).  Time to go-a-planting! 

Faced with a lot of planting space but also a lot of different types of plants and seeds, we decided to go the SFG (square foot gardening) route:

 

Dave built some pretty serious tomato cages out of concrete reinforcing grid - those tomatoes are not escaping this year!

Our 4x4 bed (bottom of this post) was converted into our herb garden, and we also made a berry bed for our blueberries, raspberries, strawberries and boysenberries (after a rather involved soil amendment to lower the pH).

Take a good look!  They look beautiful now....  hopefully they continue to look that way (just bigger....).

First things first: tomatoes!

The dirt is in the beds, so now it's time to buy plants and plant stuff! We first attended the Tomatomania show, held at the Tapia Brothers Farm Stand. We forgot to take pics, but I borrowed these photos from the LA Farm Girl blog:

It was a great event!  So great, in fact, that we were inspired to buy twelve tomato varieties and a ridiculous number of basil plants (bruschetta, yum)! Here they are, at their new home; all that's left is the planting:

 

Dirt, dirt everywhere....

We ordered a delivery of dirt and mulch to fill the raised beds and the walkway around them...  once it was in the driveway, though, we realized we may have gotten in over our heads! This stuff needed to be transported to the exact opposite corner of our back yard....

So we hired a couple of guys to do the heavy lifting - whew! It may not seem like a lot, but by the end of the day they'd managed to fill up the beds and spread the mulch:

Building and positioning the raised beds

Dave has spent a couple of weekends now planning and building our new raised beds. I helped move them into place - very heavy-duty and heavy to move around!  We're relieved that we've got them in place now:

A little bit of varnish (applied over a week), a big varnish-induced headache, some preparatory tubing for plumbing work, and voila:

It starts with a removed swing set and a class about tomatoes...

When we bought our house in May 2011,  this part of the yard contained a swing set:

We gave the set away to a nice family from Orange County, then proceeded to store extra soil and rocks from the atrium re-do, which became Matilda's favorite digging spot....

And now our epic journey has begun: this weekend we attended a "CSUN-al" gardening class which covered tomatoes - different varieties, how to plant them, etc. Scott Daigre from Tomatomania got the crowd all excited, and this became the starting point of our planning to create a raised bed garden in the back corner of our yard.