Today we finally started staking out our vegetable garden. Let me start off by saying it took way longer than we had expected. Our garden is pretty asymmetrical and making a rectangle in the middle took quite some effort, despite our measurements we took last weekend.

We will basically have space for 6 raised beds and our greenhouse and after inspecting our work we must say this will definitely work out for us. Every gardening book and website tells you to take detailed measurements of your garden and making a plan. This is definitely a good idea! We had to tweak our original plan a bit since we didn’t spend enough time measuring, but now it works out great.

We started off marking the outside corners of the vegetable garden. Measure, measure and remeasure – this forms the basis of all the sub divisions for flower beds and such. One way to make sure that the perimeter is square is to measure the two diagonal distances – they should be exactly the same length. Use wood stakes and string to mark off the different sections of the yard. There is a 50cm walkway around our garden, so the next step was to make a second perimiter inside the rectangle. – This is actually much easier than the outside string, and as partitions get smaller the easier it becomes.

We are quite thankful we are now done with this process, the next step will be to dig out the path between the raised beds and setting up the beds. More on that next time.