Welcome! We’re so glad you are interested in gardening with us!
Step#1 assumes you have enough sun for at least a 4x4ft bed. If however, you do not have said amount of sun, please read through this step anyway, to learn about plant spacing and watering/feeding needs, but know we will get back to your special situation in Step #3 for alternative beginner garden options.
In this step, we will show you three things:
- How to build a beginner raised bed garden in one day
- How to know when to put each plant in the ground
- How to monkey around with our plant lists
So, let’s get started!
First, go watch our 6-minute recorded webinar HERE about making a great no-dig garden soil. but close your eyes at the end, because we start talking about some advanced permaculture tricks that aren’t in this email short course for six more lessons!
So, what time of year is it?
If the nursery shelves are packed to the gills with tomatoes and cucumbers, go straight to our Beginner Garden in a Day post and follow the directions. It will tell you everything you need to build a quick hot weather raised bed garden in a day.
If the nursery shelves are packed to the gills with broccoli and cabbage, go straight to our Fall/Spring Garden in a Day post and follow the directions. It will tell you everything you need to build a quick cool weather raised bed garden in a day.
But what if you’re in between seasons, or you don’t like our plant lists?
Then you need to do three things:
1. Build the BED according to the directions in either one of the above garden plans. Look over the plan, so you have a good idea of how much you can fit in the bed. You can’t rip out all our plants and replace them with 75 tomatoes. Not enough room.
2. Download and print out our garden planner for notebooks.
3. Find your local area last frost and first frost dates for your area (it will open in a new tab) and fill out our planners working forward and backward in weeks from your frost dates. As you count forward into your summer season, you will cross the same dates on your fall season. Now you have a comprehensive, year-round planting guide so you can ignore our cookie-cutter plans.*
*Be sure, though, to pay attention to spacing recommendations on your seed packets and transplants. Ignore the spacing between rows (since you don’t have rows in a raised bed), but obey the spacing between plants on a row. Or, you can just page through all my garden plans and see how I did it for individual plants: Root crops, Squash, Spring/Fall, Summer.
Read More!
If you want to see specifics on annual garden plants, check out our posts about planting tomatoes, cucumbers, and spring mix lettuces. And if you want to see all the plants we’ve killed over and over and over, check out our FLOPS.
For more information about starting your first garden, choosing the right plants, and getting GOOD success out of the chute:
Available at Amazon, and on Kindle
Barnes and Noble, and on Nook
Beginner gardening series: 1)Beginner Garden in a Day, 2)Composting, 3)Alternative Beginner Gardens
Intermediate gardening series: 4)Lasagna gardening, 5)DIY mixes and solutions, 6)Indoor seed starting