Constructing the frames for the Square Foot Gardens.

We've decided that we can fit four 4' x 4' gardens in the Strip Garden area.  My father-in-law was in town this week and he helped me to build our frames.

Mel's book says you only need a 6" depth and that you can stack boxes in order to grow plants like carrots that require deeper soil.  We decided that we didn't want to deal with that so we bought 12" deep two by fours.

Here's what the frames looked like after construction.

I didn't take a good picture of the construction, but here's what the frame looks like empty.

The mid-before picture.

Here is a picture of what the Strip Garden looked like after it was cleared but before the construction of the square foot gardens.

At the far end is the blackberry bush and the strawberries.

In the middle is the Bradford pear (which will probably have to come out before it gets too big).  You can see our very sad, sad tomato plants that didn't like the Texas clay soil even after we mixed in several cubic feet of compost.  We grew herbs in the container gardens.

In one of our container gardens we grew parsley.  Come to find out, black swallowtail caterpillars love parsley.  Over the course of the growing season this year, we found several caterpillars, put them in our caterpillar nursery and nursed them into butterflies.  Here are pictures of one of our successes.  Next year we're going to plant a bunch more parsley.