We can officially cross off Phase 1 (ish) from our master garden plan! Kind of… Well, not really – we’re going to have to redo it… whoops!

So, the garden layout I designed back in February doesn’t work. We got halfway through the growing season and BAM! It was an absolute failure (not really, I’m exaggerating a bit, but it definitely doesn’t work for me). Before we jump into that though, let’s quickly recap how far we got with our master garden plan before the tears came:

Remember what we started with?

• Open area? Check.
• Sun exposure? Check.
• Not level at all? Check, check!

We tilled the ground & built raised garden beds:

We tilled, terraced, and leveled the ground. Then built 4 three-foot by eight-foot raised garden beds out of some really inexpensive wood bought off Facebook Marketplace.

Built a trellis & transplanted our seedlings:

With just a few 2x2s and spare wire fencing, we built a gorgeous trellis for our climbing plants! We filled the two beds on the trellis with a bagged soil and compost mixture and transplanted all our seedlings.

Each bed had 4 tomato plants (for a total of 3 varieties between the two beds), 2 bell pepper plants, 2 zucchini plants, 2 yellow squash, 2 cucumbers, onions, and herbs. One bed had two varieties of lettuce and the other celery.

Can you start to see some of the problems we might have? 20+ plants in a 3×8 bed… I may have gotten overzealous.

Installed fence posts for a fence:

Setting posts for this fence was a nightmare! About 16 inches down our post holes, we hit just a solid layer of rock which made the entire process so awful. Ugh! (Hats off to my husband for providing the muscle to get those posts in!)

I may have put off painting the posts, and now they’re a bit warped from the weather – but that’s ok! We’re just going to call it the fun house fence and move on! (P.S. They’re still not painted.)

Fast forward a little bit to where the dogs got into the beds and trampled over everything:

Remember me mentioning tears before? Here we go! Luckily, all the plants survived being trampled, but this was devastating for me. It also set back the growth rate by a few weeks for most of the vegetables – it’s September, and we’re just now getting ripe bell peppers!

Add Mulch & Call It Done!

JUST KIDDING! The original plan was to terrace the rest of the garden and mulch around all the beds so we would have pretty walkways, right? Except… somewhere between installing fence posts and the dogs getting into the garden, I quickly learned that my original layout wasn’t working for me… So we’ve stopped all the construction progress on the garden until we can revamp it in the fall!

So why isn’t the garden layout working?

1. No fence.

I didn’t expect my dogs to go trampling into the garden beds. (Although, this was probably my fault for feeding them zucchinis. You know when animals get the taste for the kill, they just keep on going for it? The same must apply for the taste of zucchinis.)

We put a temporary fence around the garden beds so the dogs couldn’t get into them anymore. Unfortunately, it made it a real pain to access the garden myself, so this was the point where I started to lose motivation for this season’s garden. So before we plant any new crops next spring, the main fence is getting installed!

2. Three-foot wide garden beds.

The problem? I am short. Short arms. Short legs. Short reach length.

Since I incorrectly measured our garden depth, we could only fit four 3ft-wide beds in the layout. The problem is that two beds would be attached to a trellis, and the others would eventually be up against a fence. I can’t reach across the beds from only one side! I really wasn’t expecting that.

Seriously, I did a ton of research. Three feet wide was apparently the optimal width. Wrong. Jokes on me – I’ve been standing inside my beds to get to the tomatoes, squash, and cucumbers… *eye roll*

3. Too many plants in one bed, aka overcrowding!

I was trying to do the square foot method for my garden, except it doesn’t work very well. Sure, I grew a lot of vegetables. Except, I could barely reach anything because there were SO MANY PLANTS. Do you know how big bush variety squash plants get? GIANT.

Now what?

Well, we redo it all, of course! I’m not done gardening yet, dang nabit!

Once the fall weather starts to kick in, I’ll pull everything out and downsize the beds. I’m thinking 1-1/2 feet wide for the beds that attach to the trellis and 2 feet wide for the rest of the beds. The 8-foot length is working out great, so that will stay the same.

This means I should be able to squeeze a couple extra beds into the garden giving me more room to spread out my vegetables! No more square foot gardening for me. *cue evil laughter*

I do absolutely love gardening. This season may not have gone as planned, but that’s part of the learning process!