Today begins our 2009 garden-blogging season. Our site will follow our garden from May 17 through the late fall of 2009. We'll be posting photos nearly every day of our prizes and our failures. We welcome comments and suggestions. We'll also post tips and comments on the latest and greatest in organic gardening and organic products.

As we're getting this up a little late in the season. I'll give you a quick run down of the garden haps and history. Our garden began as a brainstorm as to what to do with a patch of backyard that had once been occupied by a pool. The pool was one of the popular 18' ring pools. We had trucked in lots of sand for it in order to level the area it was located as well as to soften the pool floor. Anyway, our first struggle was going to be the soil. Under that few inches of sand we have clay, clay, and more clay. We have about six inches of top soil and then clay in the areas outsid of that pool ring. After a bit of research on all the methods of gardening we decided to go with raised beds. Three springs back, 2006?, we began by building out our first section of raised beds. We trucked in 5 cubic yards of clean (no toxic chemicals, pesticides, etc. in the soil) top soil with no clay content. We planted the basic vegetables and had good results.

Three years fast forward and the garden has been a big hit for our family. We eat about 85% of what we harvest and give away the other 15% to friends and family.

In March of this year we started our own seedlings as a trial as to what we could grow in our 59 degree basement with a basic fluorescent shop lamp. Well, we have over 60 tomatoes, 60 broccoli, 20 pepper, 12 cilantro, 18 basil, 12oregano, 36 lettuce, and 6 squash plants. This was just an experiment to see if we could get our own plants started from seeds. We did, but they are a bit small still for being one week from Memorial Day. In West Michigan Memorial Day is traditionally the time when most people will begin planting their gardens and flowers. Frosts and Freeze are minimal and you can feel pretty safe that temperatures won't drop blow 40, although we had two frosts last year after we planted. We'll still purchase plants this year for the raised beds and we'll use our tomato and pepper plants we started in containers. We'll check out our local Farmer's Market for great plants. I've had the best luck and quality with locally grown plants.

This year the garden will contain; strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, lettuce, carrots, radish, spinach, redskin potaotoes, blueskin potatoes, brocolli, green beans, four types of peppers, and at least five different types of tomatoes.

So let the blog grow as we detail the plants and events. We hope you enjoy our garden!