Wow, you have been busy! I can't believe how big your tomato plants are already. I am curious how you handle the landscape fabric. It looks like it's stapled to the beds, so do you plant to pull it up at the end of the year to amend your beds, or will you leave it in place and plant crops on the same spacing each year? Looks like you'll have enough to feed an army!

Wow! Awesome! Pretty cool garden you have yourself going! You have some great ideas!

Fun! Wow -- I guess you'll be making a lot of tomato sauce, huh? :)
On my computer it sounded normal -- no horses breathing.
Garden on!

What a wonderful garden. Looks great. That sucks about your strawberry plants. You are going to be swimming in peppers.

lantanascape, I am with you on the LS-Fabric.
I wish you had a link to the before & after pics.
Great job.

Facebook has influenced too much of my life- I want to hit a "like" button for your garden. :)

You tore up the lawn and built all those boxes in just a few months? Wow! Not to mention that your plants look very big and healthy. Great job!

Super garden Rathos. The sound on the video is fine including the big sigh after walking and talking thru ALL that space. I did get a little dizzy watching though. Perhaps steady shots from distance followed by zooming in would be as informative.

Your plants all appear to be growing perfectly. What is the basic soil under the landscape fabric?

Why all the black stuff?

I'm going to put together a better video today, with a bit of further explanation, as well as some more shots to show the full before and after all in one place.

It's really the only way for me to get perspective on the scope of all this work, lol.

Cheers,

-Rathos

Just when I was starting to feel good about my garden, I had to see yours.

Hey, how are the Turkish eggplant?

So, here we go, long post incoming. Had a bit of a video snafu earlier, and in the process found out that AVCHD editing software is either expensive or... expensive. So I re-shot the new vid and then proceeded to completely forget what I wanted to say. lol.

At any rate, I'm compiling this to show some illustration of where I started this spring versus where I am now. I have a bunch of photos, and I'll link the album on picasa, as well as the new video at the bottom of this post once i get it loaded on youtube and all set up.

The first picture in the panorama and wide view sets were taken in february, the second picture in march, the third in april, and the fourth today in june. The others I included merely to show the amoutn of growth in two months.

The new video is a bit long winded (I do love to talk) but goes further in depth as to the landscape fabric, the watering system, the boxes, soil composition, et al. As i disclaim at the end, I don't think i'm really the person to teach people anything about gardening, but I'm happy to share what i've read, learned, and later found, and what has worked for me. There are some very educated people on this site who have been doing this a LOT longer than I, much more knowledgeable than I, and a lot of my success is due to dissecting their advice and applying it to my own setup.

Let's get to it.

Before and after pictures, from yard to garden:

February
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March
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April
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June
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Panorama:
February
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March
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April
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April (covered)
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June
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Corner, April
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Corner, June
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Tomato & pepper rows, April
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Tomato & pepper rows, June
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Link to album:

Before and After

So there it is, all in one space.

Southeastern PA.
All boxes are 4x12 (24 boxes total).
Base soil is gravelly loam.
All boxes are amended with a total of 12 yards of aged mushroom soil and maybe 20 lbs of espoma tomato tone before being covered.
No further fertilization yet this season.
Gilmour/generic nylon soaker hoses, in-line fert tank, pressure regulator, valve control to centrally control water by pairs of boxes.
No pesticides used to date.
round-up used once only on borders of garden, not adjacent to boxes.
CRW cages for tomatoes, hoops for other stuff.
I built that crap deck in 3 hours.
I don't want to discuss cost going into it this year. lol.
I literally did 97% of this work by myself. my gf helped stack some wood (and planted a handful of plants, credit where credit's due), and one of my buddies helped with shoveling a couple yards of the mushroom compost. Everything else, yours truly.
Well over 100 items were started from seed, other things I ordered from various places.

It's been real. Hope everyone is having a great gardening season, look forward to hearing thoughts and seeing pictures of your stuff too!

Cheers,

-Rathos

(note: youtube failed, so the video should be live by about 8pm eastern. they could have mentioned a time limit BEFORE i wasted two hours uploading/processing. c'est la vie)

Here is a link that might be useful: Longer Garden Tour, with some crappy explanation