Our Backyard Vegetable Garden | Part 1: The Plans

Follow along on our family’s journey of creating a (hopefully) plentiful backyard vegetable garden! Read through part 1 (of who knows how many posts) that will share our successes and failures of this prject. Part 1 of our backyard vegetable garden series shares the plans on how we want to expand, what we want to plant, and how we want to decorate it!

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I have this habit on the blog of not really sharing stuff until it was finally complete. Many of you follow me on instagram and know that I share more there in sneak peeks on my instagram stories, but I figured it was about time for my long time blog readers to get the early scoop too.

You may remember last spring when we were all stuck at home (ya know, that whole pandemic thing?). We decided on a whim to start our first backyard vegetable garden with one small raised bed in the back of the house. The girls loved to water it, check for weeds, and pick the harvest that grew.

We successfully grew basil, cucumbers, tomatoes and baby pumpkins that eventually took over in fall. This year we hope to repeat these successes and then some, but in a bigger space.

Here are the plans for our backyard vegetable garden!

• Create more raised garden beds – We only had one last year, but this year we decided on 6! This will allow us to obviously grow more plants, but also spread out the varieties we do try. We put too many in the one space last year so I don’t want to crowd the plants and have it too dense.
• Fence in our garden – Since we’re moving the garden further from the house we need to fence it in to hopefully deter some critters from enjoying our bounty. Derek’s planning to build a wood and wire fence with a latching gate based on some ideas we found on pinterest, but not based on any one in particular. It might not be the most beautiful structure but we hope it keeps the animals at bay and, if needed, we can try for a different style next year.

• Get a longer hose or add another water spout – Derek’s going to partner with my brother in law on this project as he’d had more plumbing experience. But we definitely need a way to water this garden which is a little further off the house than the last one. I’ll let you know where we net out on this decision.
• Build some DIY Trellis structures – Maybe we can design something cool? I just know we need something taller than what we had last year for our cucumbers!

• Plant a larger variety of plants – Last year we had ALL those plants I mentioned above in one small box. Last week (as I shared on Instagram) we planted some seeds in a Jiffy Greenhouse kit to get the sprouts started. It’s only been a few days we already see some of the lettuce sprouting! We haven’t yet hit the last frost so we’re hoping to get some healthy starts inside before moving them outside. (PS the kit is cheaper at Lowes or Home Depot!)
• Craft some garden decorations – Come on, you didn’t expect us to do something where there wasn’t a little art involved right? I plan to get the kids involved in some cute ways to decorate our garden including possibly painting some garden stones as plant markers, bring their fairy gardens inside the garden in a special area and maybe create some other garden decor.

Wish us luck and leave us all your beginner gardening tips below!