This year, I tilled the soil and added some cheap plant food. Then I planted two-thirds of the seeds the proper way, and haphazardly sprinkled the remaining seeds over the area and kicked them into the soil with my shoes. This way I can tell if it’s worth the trouble of spacing and burying the seeds for next year. The wife also planted about a dozen dollars worth of perennial flowers throughout the garden to attract bees. I’ll post an update in a couple of months when there’s something to talk about.

As you can see, the only herb we had to re-plant was basil. Our rosemary is getting out of control and our parsley, chives, sage, thyme, oregano, and cilantro are all coming back. I might need to plant some more dill and lavender. We also had our rhubarb, leeks, and onions come back this year.

Update: Seed Experiment Results

It’s designed to look like the terracotta pot is suspended by the upper lip, but it’ll really be sitting on cross bars inside the box.

Here is the inner bracing for the two boxes:

Once the pot is filled with soil, it’ll be very heavy. Since the lower braces are going to have to support all of that weight, I added corner supports and a cross bar. When the box is finished, I’ll add perpendicular cross bars for extra support.

Next I added 3/8″ plywood sides to form the boxes and got ready to cut the pieces for the top.

This is a neat little tool. It’s the two points of a compass that can be attached to almost any yardstick for making large arcs and small circles:

I had to guess a little bit on the circumference. I don’t have calipers large enough to measure the pot’s width. I guess I could have measured it with my wife’s measuring tape and worked backwards to get the radius, but I was told there would be no math. Anyway, it worked out fine.

Here are the planter boxes after I’ve caulked the inner joints, filled in the screw holes, and added an accent piece to hide the joints on the top:

I routed a mild curve around the outside edge of the top pieces and added the other cross bars on the inside:

I painted it with several coats of flat, exterior, white paint, and carried the planters and the pots to the front porch. I just set the plants in the pots to see how it all looks. My wife and I will actually plant them sometime this week.

The decorative cut-outs in my original design were supposed to mimic the ornamentation on the porch swing (and the shutters). But after some thought, I decided it was too much. You know, “less is more” and all that. I wanted the terracotta pots to noticeably juxtapose the white paint, and I think I got the effect I was looking for. The problem is that the steps aren’t centered, and having these boxes on either side puts an exclamation point on that flaw. As someone who’s a stickler for symmetry, this drives me crazy.

Still, the planters are serving their purpose. They act as a natural barrier to give us a little more privacy while keeping the space open:

I know it all looks jammed together in the picture, but the porch is bigger in reality. It’s fun to look at now. Aside from the Adirondack rocker, I made everything on the porch. Even the railing.

You should have seen me trying to drive with these 2x10x12s on top of my car.

We laid out the area with string and spray paint. There will be a brick walkway between the two beds. The idea is to build the garden this year, and then build a pergola over the concrete slab next year, and finally encircle the whole area with a loosely-spaced picket fence complete with an arbor entrance.

I had to swing the pickax all day just to get the channels dug out, while my wife went behind me and widened the trench with a shovel. The area is in the corner of my lot next to my neighbor’s trees, so there are are roots everywhere that made digging very difficult. But after the first day, we got the two beds in place. On the second day, I had to break up all the soil and excavate all the roots from inside the beds. After that, I leveled the ground between them and my wife laid the brick walkway and filled the gaps with aggregate:

I sprayed some water seal mixed with a little stain on the lumber, and we planted our crops for the season:

We put in grape, roma and heirloom tomatoes, red, yellow and green bell peppers, squash, zucchini, banana peppers, cabbage, basil, thyme, parsley, sage and oregano.

UPDATE: 6/08

We definitely did something right: