My first in-ground garden!

I’m so excited!

My sweet husband built these beds for me. You’ll notice that they aren’t your traditional raised garden beds. We decided to take advantage of the rocks on our property to build up the back wall of the beds and we used the slope of the terrain here to build contoured terraces which will harvest the natural runoff of rainwater that flows from the front of the property.

If harvesting rainwater is a new idea for you I’d highly recommend Rainwater Harvesting, Vol 2 by Brad Lancaster. There is a volume one, but this 3 volume set isn’t cheap, and the second one is the most essential in terms of implementation and determining what is most useful for your site.

So far our plan seems to be working. We have three drain pipes that are directed to this site and between collecting the rain flow and the runoff from the drain pipes the garden seems to be staying well watered. I put in our first seeds 1.5 weeks ago and I haven’t had to water once to keep them moist. We have had periodic rain and it seems like our rainwater harvest is a success so far.

Stay tuned as I post garden updates through the season. Next week I’ll give more details on how we built our beds.

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