Knowledge is power, so I'm trying to arm myself with as much as possible before undertaking our very ambitious -- too ambitious? -- urban gardening project. I mentioned the other day that we were hoping the dirt part of the yard would suffice for our raised beds, but after monitoring how much sun the area gets during the day, we realized that it doesn't receive enough hours of direct sunlight a day to grow all of the veggies that we want to grow. We'll still use that area, but switched gears a bit and decided to do some sort of floating deck there due to the invasive surface roots of the ficus nitida trees that our back neighbors planted there 10 years ago as a way to shield the yard from the street.

So, I made my way over to the local library and cleared the gardening shelf!

urban gardening books [Front Yard Veggies]

I'm obsessed with Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew and that's what we're basing our new garden plans on. Instead of the dirt area part of the yard, we're going to move our patio table and chairs from the cement part and do raised beds here.

urban gardening patio and planter [Front Yard Veggies]

I've also been thinking about trying to put some trellises in to block out the empty, barren lot next door. That apartment building has been uninhabited since we moved in here in 2016 and it's a reaaaaaaal eyesore.

Anywhoo. I sketched out some 4x4 beds, but after I did that I realized that for square foot gardening in this space, we can actually put a few beds together into a row. The existing raised bed in the photo is too big (we had no idea what we were doing when we built it really haha) so we're going to take that apart and create two new ones from the wood. I'm also going to go to a couple local construction sites and ask the foreman if they have any scrap lumber that they're going to throw away to see if we can construct the rest of them on the cheap!

I'm gradually making my way through the rest of the books and picking and choosing helpful little nuggets that we'll incorporate into our urban gardening adventure. For reference, here are the books that we're reading if you're interested!