the DIY: CINDER BLOCK RAISED GARDEN BED

We decided to add on to our garden to accommodate all the tomatoes that Casey wanted to plant. As you can see, we are probably going to be drowning in tomatoes... IF we keep them up the right way. We made our first raised garden bed with wood sides but when we realized you could do the same with cinder blocks, our lives were changed. The wood one really wasn't that hard to make (our guy friend may have helped out a little) but this just made it even easier. You will need:

1. Cinder Blocks

2. Cardboard Boxes

3. Organic Garden Soil

4. Mushroom Compost

5. Mulch

6. Tomato Plants

7. Tomato Cages

First, pick a spot in your yard for your garden. Pick the sunniest spot possible. You can see our other garden to the right.

Outline the area in cinder blocks. We are using the fence as a back wall because we didn't buy enough cinder blocks in the beginning. We only had 10 so this is what we came up with. We ended up buying more and adding another bed in front of this one.

Lay down cardboard to cover the ground and grass. This is much easier than tilling up the ground and ripping out all the grass. We also have 3245345 boxes from moving so we were happy to utilize a few of those.

Fill your bed with garden soil. We ended up using 4 bags total. In this step though, we only used 3.

Then add a layer of compost, we used 2 bags. Then we added one more layer of garden soil and mixed the top layers together.

Measure around your plants and space them as far as they need to be.

Plant those guys. We just stuck the label in the ground that comes with the plant, maybe we will make some cute ones later? At this point we sprinkled in some plant food and watered really well.

Then cover that bed with mulch.
Then put in your tomato cages. One cage per tomato plant. Maybe we have 5 different kinds of tomatoes...

We hope to put more of our gardening adventures on the blog so stay tuned!