Raised Garden Beds Archives - Page 9 of 10 - One Hundred Dollars a Month

How to Grow Your Own Food: Updated Garden Plot Pictures

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By Mavis Butterfield on March 1, 2012 · 9 Comments

16 Raised 4′ x 8′ Garden Beds:

At this point I’m thinking about filling 14 of the garden boxes with tomato plants. If I planted 8 tomato plants per box I could fit in 114 tomato plants. Do you think that would be enough for a few bottles of sauce?

Zucchini Bed: Whop T Do.

Sugar Snap Pea & Pole Bean Bed:

On Monday I planted round 1 of the Sugar Snap peas. We love to eat them raw and in stir-fry. Since I won’t be planting beans until mid-May I went ahead and planted peas now. We’ll see what happens. I plan on rigging some sort of string on the bottom portion of the wood border so the peas {and beans} can climb up towards the top of the fence.

Raised Garden Bed: Squash Patch

I have a feeling I am going to need to dig up more of the backyard to accommodate all the squash I want to try grow this summer. It will be an absolute miracle if my husband does not have me committed by the end of the summer.

Greenhouse: I’m not sure how it happened but I ended up with 2 packets of “Pole” tomato seeds. According to the package they can grow up to 6′ tall. Holy canolies. I think I’ll try to grow those in the greenhouse along with the peppers and the Moon & Star Watermelon.

Pumpkin Patch:

The Handsome Husband dug out all of the ugly heather plants bordering the lawn, I dug up the old mulch and now it’s just a matter of bringing in soil so we can grow some pumpkins. I’m really hoping my pumpkin patch idea pans out. I think it would be neat to have a big harvest party and to pick heirloom pumpkins. Who knows, maybe I’ll even be able to grow a few 100 pounders with all that Tagro.

Raspberry Beds:

The raspberry beds have been cleaned up and are ready to go. This year I think I will plant onions {or leeks} and beets near the base of the canes. This will free up some garden space. I still need to finish adding the recycled mulch around the raspberry bed and plant the seeds and then I will be done with this section of the garden. Wahooo! Spring is almost here. Can you feel it?

The Week-by-Week Vegetable Gardener’s Handbook: Make the Most of Your Growing Season

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Tacoma Urban Chicken Coop Tour 2011

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By Mavis Butterfield on June 26, 2011 · 3 Comments

In the paper the other day there was a picture that caught my eye. It was a story about an upcoming chicken coop tour in Tacoma. 2 things immediately caught my eye. Chickens & FREE Admission. 🙂

In order to get the map for the tour we first had to drive to the Garden Sphere in Tacoma. I thought this was a very clever idea on the part of the store owners. If they had simply put the addresses online we would have never gone into the über cute store and seen all they had to offer. Plants, baby chicks, garden seeds, super cute garden boots… you name it… they had it. It’s exactly the type of store I’d be willing to part my money with (and that’s saying a lot). Small, local and friendly.

The thing I liked most about the colored coop map (besides the awesome directions) were the pictures of the individual coops. Since we were short on time it was nice to be able to pick out the ones we were really interested in rather than having to drive all over town and hope for the best.

My hands down favorite was the first one we visited. It looked like it was right off of the pages of a magazine. The owners were friendly and it obvious they had put a lot of time and effort into the upkeep of their yard and chicken house.

The living roof was pretty cool too.

Next on the list was the red barn looking coop on Visscher Street.

I think what I liked best about this tour stop (besides the coop) was their property was situated right in the middle of a typical city neighborhood. If you were driving by… you’d have no idea this family had chickens…

Or a garden in their backyard.

As I was walking up to their raised garden beds I noticed something a little peculiar about their vegetables…

THEY.WERE.ENOURMOUS… And one thing immediately came to mind. Tagro. So I complimented the homeowner on his bountiful crop and asked if he used Tagro. He said he used “mostly Tagro” to grow his vegetables. Wowza! If you don’t know what Tagro is… it’s basically bio-solid waste from the city of Tacoma that has been treated. Humanure at it’s finest. And it’s FREE if you’re willing to shovel it yourself! 🙂 Holy Garden Crack… I gotta get me some of that!

After the giant vegetable/chicken tour The Girl and I headed to our last stop of the day…

This guy had built his coop out of 90% recycled and repurposed materials.

He had built two of them in fact. Pretty neat-o if you ask me. If I was a chicken I’d totally want to live in one of these. Even though this property didn’t have a ton of landscaping or giant vegetables growing in the back yard… The chicken owner was very friendly. He happily answered people’s questions… and I thought that was pretty cool in itself. If people came into my backyard to look at my Eglu I’d probably just head inside and lock the door until they left. So to stand out there for 6 hours and talk to people is pretty amazing if you ask me.

As we were leaving the recycled materials coop… The Girl pointed out his neighbor’s yard (how did I miss that?). It was an edible front yard… and the first of its kind I had ever seen up close and in person. Besides the standard herbs I spotted raspberries, strawberries, squash, lettuce and peas.

It totally makes me want to dig up my front yard and open a u-pick farm… Although I’m sure The Handsome Husband would have something to say about that. 🙂

All in all… a great event!

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Behind the Garden Gate…

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By Mavis Butterfield on March 8, 2011 · Leave a Comment

Spring is on it’s way…

Out with the old (dead)

And in with the new (dirt)

Hauling bark should be a part of every ones exercise regimen….

All but 1 of the 17 garden beds is prepped/filled and ready to go…

Behold the glow of neon orange bark…

I announced to the HH that we were about 2 yards sort of bark…
He suggested we just spray the rest of the garden with orange paint.
Haha… very funny.

Green onions were the first seeds planted this year…

Followed shortly by Sugar Snap Peas…

I can wait for Sugar Snap Pea Season to arrive and all the stir fry dishes I’ll make with them.

Maybe then…
I’ll be able to garden without snow pants.

How about you? Have you planted anything yet?

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Mavis Is No Longer Jumping

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By Mavis Butterfield on May 12, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Dear Reader,

Mavis will no longer be “jumping” as in “jumping off the processed food chain.”

Mavis began this blog one day (about 2 years ago) after she Googled the words “Organic Gardening.” It lead her to a blog called Future House Farm which lead her to a few other interesting blogs like Fast Grow the Weeds and Path to Freedom.

She eventually clicked on a comment that ThyHand had left on their website which led her to MamaJJ and somehow along the way she found Mr. H. And somehow some other people eventually found her.

And because Mavis enjoyed reading about other peoples lives, she thought she should start her own blog. Maybe someone would find her blog as interesting as she found theirs.

And so she did.

There’s only 1 problem: Mavis no longer feels the need to document what she is buying. She no longer wants to keep a tally of each and every avocado or box of wheat thins she buys.

She no longer wants to feel guilty for throwing a .59 cent pint of Hagen Daz ice cream in her cart for all the teenagers to devour who come here regularly. She no longer wants to be judged for buying/not buying local or organic or to rationalize WHY she brought 100 boxes of FREE MONEY MAKING CEREAL home. She no longer feels the need to tell you that she kept 20 boxes and gave the other 80 away.

Bottom line, “Jumping off the processed food chain” no longer belongs at the top of her blog. Now don’t get me wrong, Mavis HAS made some pretty big changes around here in the past year like:

Instead of buying super cheap eggs at Costco from diseased caged birds, she now has a flock of her own birds: 8 to be exact. So now instead of buying crappy eggs she eats home grown organic free range eggs and her children have 8 unique backyard pets. Something she NEVER in a million years would of ever done if she didn’t read about backyard chickens online.

Also, Mavis and family no longer buy Factory Farmed meat. Nope. Only happy, humanely raised organic meat, and I think that is a biggie!

Also, through reading other people’s blogs, Mavis discovered raised garden beds. And if there is one thing Mavis loves to do all summer long it’s grow free food. And LOTS of it!

So even though the title of this blog has changed, Mavis has not. She’s still here, still crazy, still clipping coupons, still daring grocery store managers to throw her out of their grocery stores for buying each and every item with a coupon. She still tries daily to annoy her husband and her kids and she’s still collecting cans along side of the road and as of late she has been seen walking into Panera for the free bread samples and using their toilets on her walks and filling up her water bottle with FREE water from the bathroom sink only to sneak out the back door like a crazy lady.

Yep she’s still here. Just under a different title.

FYI: Since returning from London, Mavis LOVES to say the word toilets, as in “Excuse me… where are the toilets?” Because in Europe they don’t ask where the BATHROOM is unless of course you want to bathe. In fact Mavis loves to ask, “Where are the toilets” soooo much that she does it when out in public just to watch the Handsome Husband squirm.

This post may contain affiliate links. These affiliate links help support this site. For more information, please see my disclosure policy. Thank you for supporting One Hundred Dollars a Month.