Wild Card Garden Bug: My Simple Plan

So... I'm not a "gardener". Although, I hope to be able to loosely use the term by the end of the year. That's one of my goals. I seem to have a lot of them lately. I should probably also mention that I have three little boys between the ages of baby and seven. They are utterly awesome and I won't promise that they won't be mentioned, or pictured, or that their toys/messes won't be apparent. So if you are looking for something immaculate, keep on clicking.

This all started when my husband decided to quit his job working for the big bad oil guys. Making awesome money. He wanted to follow his dream, and I wanted to support that completely. Remember that part where I said I have three boys? Yeah, they eat. A lot. Since we were going to be basically cutting our budget in half, and I didn't want my kids to live on nitrates, I came up with the BRILLIANT idea of cooking everything from scratch and growing our own fruits and veggies. And I've never gardened. I also had never made bread before. Yeah.

I started with everything, because I'm not capable of starting small. The cooking part was fun and I have really increased my skill set. Yay! That brings us to gardening. I started with a killer garden plan. Then I bought my seeds from local sources that promise heirloom/organic/non-GMO goodness. After that it was time for my starts. That part was kind of sad. I bought grow lights and everything was really leggy. After some great advice, I redid my setup, kicked my grow lights to the curb, and my babies are thriving now.

Okay, so blah blah blah. What about the GARDEN?! Who cares about all of that other crap?? Ahh, the garden! Well, remember that budget issue I talked about? I basically had almost no money to fund my little project. Also, our yard was 80% shade and 20% gravel. Guess where the sun hit? I hope you said "gravel"! I decided that I would have to get over "perfect" and just build what I could with I had, which was quit a lot, actually. Nothing fancy, but still! Oh, and I do all of this with my baby on my back. He totally loves it.

I had:

More gravel than I could ever need

Like a hundred concrete blocks

Some cute square pavers

Quit a few rectangle shaped pavers

Four random bricks

Semi-cute flower boxes

Four 4' x 8' raised beds with some rotten spots

Several random landscaping pieces that were already there but I could not name if my life depended on it...

Okay, so these are my "rows". I have four of them and I am SO excited about them! This area gets almost no sun. This is actually where the beds used to to be, but I (with a friend) dug them out and moved them, since was my only dirt in the whole garden.

If you turn the other direction this is what you will see. I repaired/cut down some of the raised beds and arranged them here. Then I shoveled in dirt (this was the only thing I HAD to buy) and filled them and planted grass seed. It is just now starting to come up. To the right are the blueberry beds that were already here. I need to fix the top, because it is ugly as sin and driving me nuts, but can't figure out what to do just yet.