Life's Choices

Life is all about choices isn't it? Well I have chosen to endeavour to live my life in a more simple, frugal and environmentally aware manner. As I see it, it can only enhance my life by enabling me to save money, save our health (physically and mentally) and save the planet!

The first big step we have taken is to build a vegetable garden. This is the raised garden bed we built last year: We decided to start small to see if we would enjoy it, be able to cope with it and most of all, actually grow something!!

Well I thought there was nothing better than to be able to go out and pick a freshly grown capsicum for our salad and my little daughter loved to eat the apple cucumbers straight off the vine! I found it an amazing experience to plant a little seed and to watch it sprout and then grow into something you can actually eat.

So this year we decided to expand and my dearest, most patient husband built me three more raised beds: (He did a GREAT job!)

The first bed was made from old railway sleepers my dearest brother was getting rid of from his garden so they were free! (Thanks Bro!) It was based on the square foot gardening method - it was filled with 1/3 compost/manures, 1/3 cocoa peat and 1/3 vermiculite which seemed to work quite well.

We had to buy the sleepers for this lot unfortunately as they are not cheap but hopefully will be worth it in the end! We put weed mat and cardboard down in the bottom of these beds. Luckily there was a council clean-up at the time we built these and I managed to get heaps of cardboard off the side of the road much to my littlest daughter's disgust! She said she didn't mind 'scabbing' for good stuff but not just for CARDBOARD! Oh well, it saved me having to chase up shops etc for their old boxes....

We then filled them with a 'veggie mix' soil blend and added heaps of different types of manures and the vermiculite (I find this makes it a nice light blend). We didn't add the cocoa peat this time as I had heard that it may not be the best for the vegie patch but I did add some water saver granules. So it will be interesting to compare how these beds go.

I will take some photos of them now they are filled for you to see as soon as I can!