I’ve never been very interested in growing vegetables beyond tomatoes, and with our community-supported agriculture (CSA) share, I get a much greater variety of vegetables than I would by growing my own. It has also introduced me to a few vegetables I probably wouldn’t have tried on my own, like fennel (not a big licorice fan) and kohlrabi.

This is our third season with our CSA, Angelic Organics, and I’m determined to stay on top of it this year. Last year, with our remodel and subsequent lack of kitchen for a while, it was difficult to keep up with a menu plan using all the vegetables each week.

We’ll be getting our third share this week, and so far so good. I’ve already made pesto using the basil and spinach, the abundance of lettuce each week hasn’t daunted me, and I’m finding new recipes to try, either on Epicurious, Kalyn’s Kitchen (great blog!) or two excellent cookbooks, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone and our CSA-authored cookbook, Farmer John’s Cookbook: The Real Dirt on Vegetables.

Even though we’ll get a variety of tomatoes in our share, including heirlooms, one can never have too many homegrown tomatoes, wouldn’t you say?

That’s why we finally built a small raised garden bed conveniently located next to the compost (easy to add fresh compost to the garden, easy to toss rotted tomatoes into the compost).

This was the project we were working on when we had our Yard Crashers encounter.
Prior to this, this area was the dumping ground for additional dirt, particularly when we were building our patio. We’ve kept a tarp over the dirt to kill off as many weeds as possible until we finally were able to use it. We’ll see how successful that was in the coming months.

Not very attractive, I know, but it has been hidden between the “waste corral” and the prairie garden.

With tomato-growing time a-wasting, we stacked landscape timbers three-high, drilled through the stack and drove 24″ lengths of rebar into the ground. It was a fairly easy project once we had the right drill bit and used the old electric drill (our battery-driven one didn’t have enough power).

We had plenty of dirt piled up to fill the bed. We have four heirloom varieties planted and plenty of basil. If I could grow buffalo mozzerella to complete my caprese garden, that would be planted here too.

We capped it off with 1×6 cedar planks. The cedar plank scraps will be used for grilling salmon. Yum.

Pete added the pavers for now just to keep the mud at bay, but I’ll be moving those and shoveling the excess dirt away to make the ground more level.

The tomato cages have been added along with a soaker hose connected to the garage rain barrel. Now it’s your turn, tomatoes: grow!

Tags: CSA, garden, vegetables