All in a day's work

On a beautiful, but chilly Sunday morning I set out to attend to my garden for the first time since my move in November. Here is where I started:

Taken from my 2nd floor

Everything looked pretty dreary but, I set off to buy some compost and start on my tasks.

I decided to try a new method of sectioning off each square foot. Instead of the lath boards (which I used for my first two seasons, and is suggested in the SFG book) I wanted to try string for the following reasons:

1. The condition of my two-season boards was pretty poor, so I didn't think they were worth moving (I gave them to a fellow gardener to use).
2. Each lath boards was an inch wide, so they made the planting area within each square foot smaller (every inch counts!)
3. When moving/adding soil it was sometimes challenging to spread it out between the squares.
   

There honestly are probably many easier ways of going about laying out the grid. However, I decided to use 1/2" screw eyes & polypropylene string.

It was pretty time consuming and I had a minor setback when I broke my itsy-bitsy drill bit that I was using to start the 12 holes for the screw eyes, but...

Ta da! My backyard garden set up is complete and ready to go.

warm weather...I am waiting!