I posted a few weeks back about my square foot garden and what I was doing to prepare for planting this spring. Today i’m giving you an update so you can see before and after picture of where my garden was and is today. The first picture is what my garden looked like last fall after my semi successful garden I planted last year. I say semi successful because I was able to get some vegetables out of there but I was completely over run by weeds. I got a good corn harvest, some beans, cucumbers, and a few carrots.

In the end I got what I was looking for which was a few good vegetables but this year I want more. If you follow the link I posted above you will be able to see the steps I took to transform this weed bed into what i’m hoping is a successful garden this year. This next picture is my garden when I got done with putting in raised beds and mulching around the beds. I also laid black plastic around the outside of the boxes so if I decide to expand next year I wont have to worry about killing the grass and weeds.

As you can see these two pictures were taken from the same angle. The first was taken in October of 2011 and the second one was taken last Sunday 5/13/12. I put many many hours into this and hopefully I will get some great results. Here is a rundown of what I decided to plant in these boxes. The largest one on the left is strictly for sweet corn. I planted half of that and plan on planting the other half in a couple weeks. I followed the square foot garden method and planted 4 seeds per square. It seems a bit tight to me but from what i’ve read it seems to work. The front center box is full of potatoes which I planted one plant per square. The front right box has a mixture of onions and carrots. Doing some research I found that these are good companion plants so I alternated rows. I planted 9 onions per square and 16 carrots per square with a total of 8 squares apiece. The back right box has 4 watermelon plants. The back center box contains 8 cucumber plants and 8 bush bean plants at a rate of 1 per square. To save on space for the cucumber plants I built a trellis through the center of the box. It’s currently 4 feet high but I will be able to add more to it if the need arises later in the summer. Here is a picture of my planted garden with the cucumber trellis in place. Please feel free to ask any questions about what I did or how I did it. I would love to hear some feedback. I will do a monthly update on my progress throughout the summer to share my results.