How we built our dream garden (2 year recap)

In the fall of 2022, we started building our dream garden. By the summer of 2024, we had a thriving garden with raised beds, in-ground rows, straw bale gardens, and a dwarf fruit tree orchard. This video will explain how we did it. Hi, it's Peter with The Garden Family. We garden in Southwest Ohio Zone 6b and I hope you enjoy this recap of how we went from a bare patch of land to a thriving garden over the last two years. We moved to our 10-acre property early fall of 2022. It had woods, a pond, and a beautiful meadow. Now all it needed was the garden of our dreams. We had a lot of options of where to put the garden, but narrowed it down with three criteria. One, it had to have full sun. Two, it had to have access to water. And three, we wanted it as close to the house and kitchen as possible. Even though we have a lot of land and it likely would have been easier to build the garden in a back meadow, we knew from experience having the garden just off the house makes upkeep easier and more enjoyable, so we chose a gently sloping area just northwest of the house. The next decision we made was to put in raised beds. We prefer raised beds for a few reasons. One, they heat up quicker than in-ground beds in the spring. Two, they're easier to amend, weed, and maintain, and are also easier on your back. And three, you have complete control of the soil. In our case, our native soil is heavy clay soil that was not ideal for growing vegetables. We built our raised beds using 4x4 pressure-treated lumber fastened together with 6-inch lag screws. We often get questions whether pressure-treated lumber is safe for vegetable beds. Historically, they had arsenic in them and were avoided, but as of more than 20 years ago, pressure-treated wood is only treated with copper compounds that have been proven safe for veggie beds. We decided on 4x12-foot raised beds that were 4 4x4s high. Since a 4x4 is actually 3 1⁄2 inches, this means our beds are 14 inches high. Generally, you want beds at least 8 inches high for most vegetable roots. Each bed required 8 12-foot 4x4s and 4 8-foot 4x4s that were cut in half. Nowadays, it seems like a lot of people are choosing corrugated metal raised beds rather than wood. We prefer wood raised beds for a few reasons. First, we just like the look of the wood beds rather than the metal beds. The other reason is that we can attach these hoops and other attachments to the bed much easier with the wooden beds because you can screw right into them. Wood is also a lot more insulating and so it tends to keep the soil warmer in the winter as well as cooler in the summer. And the last is right here. This is probably the most important thing. The 4x4 beds are wide enough that you can actually sit on the edge of the bed and you'll be surprised how often you want to sit on your bed in order to harvest or weed. As we rolled into December, we realized we didn't have much time. Spring planting was only about four months away. We started conditioning straw bales to fill the bottom of the beds, but with the ground frozen and temperatures in the single digits, January didn't allow for much work to be done outside. We used the time instead to get our seed starting room set up and started our onion seeds. Luckily, February was unusually warm and we started to gather supplies to fill the beds, getting shipments of peat moss, arborist wood chips, along with locally sourced loads of compost. In late February, we placed hardware cloth in the bottom of the beds to prevent burrowing rodents from making their way in through the bottom. To fill the raised beds, we opted for slightly modified Mel's mix, as popularized by Mel Bartholomew's book, Square Foot Gardening. This is more expensive up front, but we're happy we invested in it. This mix is made from about 1 third compost, 1 third vermiculite, and 1 third peat moss by volume. Both the peat moss and vermiculite are incredibly slow to break down, so our investment should last a long time. We just need to add fresh compost each year to the top of the beds. One of the things that we learned when adapting to gardening in Ohio compared to California, which is where we used to live, is the extremely variable weather and increased pest pressure. To mitigate these challenges, we placed permanent hoops on our raised beds for row covers. Additions of frost cloth, shade cloth, and insect netting proved invaluable here. So we bent 10 foot, half inch EMT conduit and placed hoops on many of our beds. This allows us to easily place frost cloth in the spring and fall, and shade cloth and insect netting in the summer. We got our cool weather crops planted in April, but still had more infrastructure to finish. We had 50 additional bales of straw delivered, and started working on our straw bale gardens in addition to our raised beds. These were spaced in a grid that matched the raised beds. We started the conditioning process in April, so we were ready to plant in them when the weather warmed in May. We started getting our first harvest May of 2023. Around this time, we also needed to make a decision on how to protect our pathways from weeds. We opted for a deep layer of wood chips in our pathways. This not only will break down over time, adding fertility to the soil, but also allowed us to easily change the layout of the garden as needed without worry of stone or plastic getting in the beds. Stone pathways are a popular aesthetic right now, but I highly discourage putting stone in your garden. You are likely to regret it over the years. By June, the night swarmed and growth sped up. This gave us our first peppers and squash harvests, along with the last of the cool weather lettuces and brassicas. By July, the garden was in full swing with loads of tomatoes and other summer fruit. The hard work we put in over the winter was really paying off, and the first year garden was looking wonderful. The paste tomatoes we planted in the straw bales really started producing in August. We picked hundreds of pounds of paste tomatoes. One of our goals for the garden was to can enough tomato sauce to last until the next season. We recently purchased a motorized tomato press that really speeds up this process. In September, the harvest continued, but we also started to think about what changes we wanted to make for next year. October of 2023 came with our first froth. Me and the boys pulled a bounty of sweet potatoes from the straw bales, an impressive harvest for only two bales of straw. We also quickly got to work on the next phase of the garden, the dwarf fruit tree orchard. We decided on the final perimeter of the garden marked out the location of the fruit trees. For spacing, we decided on 10-foot on-center spacing, since we planned on keeping the trees at a small height. We chose varieties both for disease resistance, but also to have staggered harvests throughout the year. With this plan, we eventually will get fruit from May all the way into November. In November of 2023, we ordered a compost topsoil blend and created mounded beds for each tree. This will ensure a much more well-drained soil than our native clay. This diagram shows the planned tree locations in our orchard. The trees are also grouped together based on need for cross-pollination. The Japanese plums also get some afternoon shade, and the apricots and border-pushing Asian persimmons are against the house for frost protection. On this cool November day, you can see the mounded tree beds now covered with a thick layer of wood chips. We planted blueberries last November as well, in a dedicated raised bed so we can control the soil pH. While the garden was asleep, the animals definitely were not. We knew we needed a fence if we were investing in fruit trees. We opted for a split-rail fence to match the rustic feel of the garden. And that brings us into this year. Early January was bitter cold, so we kept the shovels in the barn. It was cold enough for the pond to freeze over, and we spent some time ice-skating on the pond while the garden slept under a blanket of snow. We focused on seed starting indoors, adding a few new things to our indoor grow setup. Luckily, February was relatively mild, and we spent some time outdoors winter-sowing flowers with the kids to plant throughout the garden. With winter-sowing, you place seeds within mini-greenhouses made of milk jugs. You then just leave them outside, and they will naturally germinate as the weather warms. This is especially useful for perennial flowers that require cold stratification to germinate. By the end of February, all the snow had melted, and we knew the second garden season was about to get started. With an earlier-than-normal spring, we planted our onions out in March and kept working on seed starting indoors. March is when we sow our peppers and eggplants, as they are slower growing than tomatoes, which we start in April. We also received our shipment of bare-root fruit trees and began planting them in the garden. This gave us an opportunity to see how the soil was doing that we prepared last fall, and overall it looked great. We planted more than 20 fruit trees in March and April. As the weather warmed and the redbuds began to flower, there were signs that this would be a wonderful year. I'm always amazed at the vibrance of spring after a few months of leafless winter. At the beginning of April, we planted out our brassica plants. We also received another 50 bales of straw and began arranging them for our new straw bale gardens this year. Straw bale gardening is such an amazing tool. Not only is it an excellent growing medium when conditioned, the 50 bales from last year went towards amending our beds over the off-season, adding a ton of fertility to our garden. With the new fence layout, we had a low area of the garden that would not be great to plant in. I opted to create a large-scale hookah culture area and moved a large number of rotting logs and then covered them in a thick layer of wood chips. This will slowly break down over time, creating a rich, well-draining humus. For now, the plan was to plant sprawling crops such as melons, pumpkins, and sweet potatoes in this area. The trend of early warm weather continued and we were able to plant our warm weather plants out early May. The plants we babied indoors were potted up twice and already had huge root systems. It was exciting to have the full garden planted after all that work and planning. The three larger length beds have our strawberries and blueberries. We also planted potatoes in ground this year. When the fireflies emerge from the meadow, we know we have entered the warm seasons. June is one of my favorite months in the garden. Pest pressure is still low and the plants are vibrant. A hardneck garlic we planted the fall before was harvested in late June and followed with a cover crop of buckwheat. July in Ohio is when we finally get ripe tomatoes. And once the first ones come, they tend to flood in quickly. Too many tomatoes for our family of six, but luckily we have many friends that also enjoy them. In late July, we also harvested our onions that we had started from seed more than six months before. We cure them in our barn after harvesting. The hugelkultur area we planted with pumpkins, sweet potatoes, and melons was really coming along as well. In August, the garden started to look a little bit tired, but still produced a ton. This was when the majority of our straw bale paste tomatoes were harvested. We harvested hundreds of pounds again, turning them into sauce for our family. In September, the days began to shorten and the mornings began to cool. Unfortunately, the remnants of Hurricane Helene did some damage to the plants in the garden. This did give us an opportunity to inspect the roots and soil on some of our in-ground tomato plants, and the silver lining was seeing how the clay soil we started with had transformed into something much more rich, soft, and loamy. In October, we did the yearly mowing of the meadow. We added a stone patio to the entrance of the garden and harvested our pumpkins and sweet potatoes from the straw bale gardens. In November, we had the last harvest of the season on Thanksgiving Day. Mother Nature gave us ideal fall growing conditions, allowing us to grow an abundance of vegetables for our family. The garden we carefully and painstakingly nurtured over the past two years was in turn giving back to us. We have many things to be thankful for, and this amazing garden we created is definitely one of them. It's currently November 28th. It's actually Thanksgiving, and we just pulled all of these beautiful vegetables from the garden. Tomorrow and this coming week, it's supposed to be in the teens, and pretty much no annual vegetables will survive those temperatures without a lot of protection. We're pretty much ready to put the garden to sleep at this point anyway. I hope you enjoyed the recap of how we built our dream garden over the last two years. I'm so proud of what we've done, and I know the best is yet to come. So if you want to see how our garden continues to grow and thrive over the coming years, consider subscribing to our channel. And if you have any questions I didn't answer, go ahead and leave them in the comments. I'm happy to answer them for you. Happy Thanksgiving from our family to yours, and happy gardening everyone. We'll see you next year.