Category Archives: Vegetable Gardening

Growing Shallots and Making Quiche.

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I’m thinking about changing my blog name … to “oh boy am I still learning about gardening!”.  A bit too wordy though.  It sure does convey how I feel at the moment!  I love gardening, both vegetable and flower.  I love learning new things, too.  It’s the making mistakes part that I wouldn’t mind skipping over.

I planted shallots for the first time this year.  They did really well, and grew at a nice pace and to a good size.  You *should* pull them out of the ground once the greens start to die.  I left them a while longer, hoping they would grow even bigger.  They did grow bigger, but they also got wet.  Very, Very wet.  Have I mentioned (about a million times) the terrible weather we had this summer?  So I’ve made a note to myself that in the future, I am  to pull them as soon as the greens die.  I guess I’m lucky that most of them are still usable. Some of them I had to use right away.   I was sad to have to dump some, though.  I hate waste.

A great way to use a lot of shallots?  Caramelize them, and make a quiche! Everyone in our family likes quiche (yay!).   I make my own crust – it doesn’t take long and I think it’s worth it.  The time it takes to caramelize the shallots was also worth it to get the sweet flavor; lots of butter, on a low heat, for a long time.  Even non onion eaters can’t resist the caramelized flavor!

The Gourmand Mom blog is one I follow and I love to use her recipes – even if it’s to give me ideas or guidelines.  Quiche is a good example; I like how she puts the additions in first, then the cheese, and then the egg mixture. It’s simple and comes out great.   http://thegourmandmom.com/2010/06/01/quiche-lorraine/#comments  My crust recipe was given to me by a good friend years ago (thank you Leah!).  It’s a keeper.  I use a mixture of whole wheat & white flour, so it comes out darker, but the taste is still delicious.

Have you shared any recipes lately?

Happy baking!
Dana

American Pie Dough (that really is the name of it!)
for an 8 or 9 inch single pie shell
By Christopher Kimball with Eva Katz

My only adjustment is to use ¾ cup whole wheat flour & ½ cup white flour

1 ¼ cup all-purpose flour, plus extra for dusting dough
½ teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
6 tablespoons (3 oz.) chilled unsalted butter, cut into ¼ inch pieces
4 tablespoons (2 oz.) chilled all-vegetable shortening (in Ireland I use Cookeen)
3-4 tablespoons ice water

Mix first 3 ingredients. Scatter butter pieces, then shortening and mix until cornmeal texture. I use my fingers. Really, it isn’t hard and doesn’t take long.  Sprinkle 3 tablespoons of water over mixture and fold in. Shape into ball, then flatten into 4 inch wide disk.  Dust lightly with flour, wrap in plastic and refrigerate at least 30 minutes.

Caramelized Shallot Quiche
Based on The Gourmand Mom’s Quiche Lorraine

2 1/2 cups peeled & sliced shallots
3 tablespoons butter
2 cups Emmenthaler cheese, grated
1 1/4 cup whole milk
3 eggs
Salt & Pepper
Pinch of nutmeg

Caramelize the shallots in the butter. Cook low and slow.  They shouldn’t brown like sauteing, but turn translucent first and then slowly turn darker in color.  I usually cook 30 minutes to 45 minutes (while the crust is in the fridge).

Line the crust with foil and bake in 375 degrees F (190 degrees C) for 15 minutes, remove the foil and bake a further 5 minutes.  While the crust is baking, whisk the eggs & milk, and add salt, pepper, and nutmeg.  When the crust is finished, layer with the caramelized shallots, then the cheese, then the egg mixture.  Bake for 35 – 45 minutes.

Shallots hung to dry out.

Shallots hung out to dry.

Shallots drying out.

Shallots drying out.

Shallots cleaned up and looking much better.

Shallots cleaned up and looking much better. (This is one of my favorite bowls; it was a wedding gift that was hand painted for us.)

Shallots.

Shallots.

Whole wheat & white flour crust in the making.

Whole wheat & white flour crust in the making.

Tidying up the crust.

Tidying up the crust.

Emmenthaler Cheese.

Emmenthaler Cheese.

Caramelized shallots.

Caramelized shallots.

Caramelized shallots quiche.

Caramelized shallot quiche.

Some Black-eyed Susan flowers (Rudbeckia hirta) from the garden (and another bowl of shallots!).

Some Black-eyed Susan flowers (Rudbeckia hirta) from the garden and another bowl of shallots!

An August garden tour – Potatoes, Blueberries, Pumpkins, and Apples!

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I love having a vegetable garden.  It is really cool going out into the yard and picking something for dinner.  Yeah, and at the produce shop, I have a little conversation with myself that goes something like this: “No, I don’t need to buy potatoes ’cause we have lots of them. Nope, I don’t need any zucchini cause we have too many of them! And no, no peas for us this week because we have them, too!”  And I smile to myself 🙂

I like it.  We’re still learning. And growing. And changing.  But I think it is all good.  I tend to only put “pretty” pictures in the blog.  I’ll change that this week.  One picture shows what should be the pretty pumpkin flower, but this one is eaten by slugs.  We have had so many, many, many slug this year!  It’s amazing we have an abundant harvest given how much was sacrificed to slugs.   We’ll be changing the layout of the fruit orchard this winter.  The strawberries needed more space than we planned so we’ll be spreading them out.  Now about the pumpkins: they take up a lot of space!  But I love seeing their flowers so late in the summer.  We’re hoping for some pumpkins this year – if they survive the slugs!  Luckily, our potatoes haven’t been affected by the slugs.  Our main crop variety of Organic Sarpo Mira are delicious.  The soil is excellent after the compost worked through it.  It’s quite easy to fork up the spuds, wipe off the dirt, and boil them up!  I think they just might be our favorites of the garden (for the moment, anyway).

I hope you have access to fresh garden vegetables this summer!

Dana
P.S. I changed my blog around a little bit. I hope you like it!

A view of the fruit orchard. The rhubarb has been cut, strawberries are overgrown, and the pumpkins are taking over! Apple trees are happy.

Another view of the fruit orchard. The blueberry plants on the right aren’t very big, but we were surprised by all of the yummy fruit!

Our eating apples coloring nicely.

The pumpkins growing like crazy.

Pumpkin flowers.

O.K., here is the ugly picture: the flower on the right has been eaten. I decided not to show you the picture of the slugs 🙂

I have a bunch of these tiny little pumpkins … I’m not sure if they are too late to develop fully. We’ll have to wait and see.

My “Before” picture of some of our blueberries.

The “After” picture of some of our blueberries! They were sweet and delicious!

The bed of Organic Sarpo Mira potatoes, our dinner’s worth, and the fork to lift them out with!

They really are a great size! We’re delighted with their taste, too.

I have to have a picture of flowers in my post! This was about 6 PM this evening. After yet another very wet day, the evening was simply beautiful. And for that I am very, very thankful.

Organic Colleen Spuds … Delicious!

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Vegetable gardening is still new to me. I am learning so much!  But I’m delighted that some things have turned out really well, despite my not doing things perfectly correct.  Take our spuds, for instance.  The early organic variety called Colleens were our first potatoes we planted and we were so excited.  But we had more potatoes than allotted space in that bed.  So we squeezed them in.  Yeah, I know, that was silly.  But we’ve just started eating those Colleens and oh wow! They are delicious! Have you ever dug a spud fresh out of the ground and had it for dinner?  If your answer is “no”, then you haven’t lived.  🙂  And this coming from a girl who really was not a fan of potatoes before moving to Ireland four years ago…

(For our second planting of potatoes we used more space, by the way.)

Our rainbow chard is finally coming along.  We’ve had it a few times for dinner.  I sneaked it into some pesto last week.  Otherwise I just saute it with garlic and olive oil.  I’m still waiting for our peas. They are so pretty, but not quite ready to eat.  I have lettuce in planters on our deck.  I really like that the kids just pop out the back door and pick what they want for their sandwiches.  They also like to raid the strawberry patch, which I am perfectly O.K. with! I’d rather them be eating the fruit than those darn slugs…

My parsley is really doing well. I picked some tonight just to see if it was fragrant.  I wish I had a scratch and sniff app on my blog! It smelled so nice!  I am going to have to find something to cook tomorrow that calls for parsley.  The other greens in the pictures below are my parsnips, and some carrots.  Slowly but surely, vegetables are growing.

Ireland has had a very wet summer, so I’m lucky that the veggies haven’t just floated away!  I hope you’ve had nice summer weather where you live and garden!

Dana

It was so easy to dig the potatoes up. One plant has enough potatoes for dinner for our family of five.  I am so hooked!

My two potato beds. The early organic Colleen variety are on the right, and main crop organic variety Sarpo Mira on the left.

The peas are so pretty, but not quite ready to eat. This organic variety is called Karina.

Rainbow chard with garlic & shallots in back of bed.

Organic Rainbow Chard on the chopping block.

The parsnips are doing really well.

We usually eat parsnips with carrots (more carrots than parsnips), both of which I’ve planted. But only one row of carrots have taken while three rows of parsnips are thriving!  There will have to be some creative cooking this fall!

Italian Giant Parsley grown from organic seed. Can you smell it?

From organic seed Buttercrunch lettuce on our deck.

We have a couple of containers of this lettuce on our deck. My father-in-law started them from seed for me and then we put them in these containers. I find that they do better here than in the beds, and it’s easier (for the kids) to quick get some to eat!

These are a few of the uneaten strawberries from our garden. It’s hard to keep them long enough to photograph!

Black Velvet Nasturtium which we grew from seed.

This was my first year growing flowers from seed, so I was happy with the result … flowers!

Black Velvet Nasturtium grown from seed.

You might notice that almost all of the pictures have water droplets in them!  We’ve had so much rain, but thankfully there is usually an hour or two which is dry and sometimes even sunny!  Such is weather in Ireland – it packs everything into each day!

Black Velvet Nasturtium grown from seed. (not sure how this non-black velvet one got in here!)

Weeding … and new blooms in the garden!

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Weeding, it’s like housework, it just has to be done!  I confess to much preferring being outdoors and weeding to being inside doing housework, though.  Today I had the privilege of listening to my kids play on the trampoline with their friends while I was pulling weeds.  Lots and lots of weeds.  Funny how the kids never want to pull weeds with me.  We could make a game of it; something like “let’s see who can pull the most weeds!”.  I’ll have to give that one a try tomorrow…

I’ve mentioned that our garden is in a constant state of change as we grow it, learn, and figure out how we want it to look eventually.  The area of our “fruit orchard”, I just have to put that in quotes since the area is so small we call it that affectionately, is not the shape we want it just yet.  We discovered this year that we’ve planted too close to the fence, so we’ll have to bring that area back a tiny bit.  That lovely black carpeting (read: ugly)  is where we’ll have stone paths eventually.  We planted more asparagus this year, so that space was expanded.  We’re planning on two rows of peas for next year, too, since they are growing so nicely.  When we get the shape and size finally right, we’re planning on enclosing the area.  I really want a small white picket fence.  Can you just see the pretty pink climbing roses along the fence with white hydrangea?  I’m sure I’ve pinned something like that from pinterest!

Back to reality, and our current garden!  The first of my Dutch Iris is blooming, and I think it is so pretty. The first of my roses has also finally bloomed.  The sunlight this evening captured it so brilliantly.   The mess in the middle of my front yard is my next garden project.  I have to kill the grass (with newspapers & cardboard). I’ve also put the sod which was dug up from other places in the yard there, to incorporate it into the new garden.  There’s no point in wasting perfectly good sod!  I’m glad my husband is a patient man, and doesn’t mind the mess involved with killing the grass the slow way.  Good things come to those who wait 🙂

I hope you don’t have too long to wait for blooms in your garden!
Dana

The above picture  is the “before weeding” look of the fence line.

Now you can actually see the hedge!

A look at the “orchard” at sunset.

I thought the peas looked so pretty!

I am looking forward to eating our zucchini!

O.K. that’s a lot of pictures for one Dutch Iris … but it feels like I waited forever for it to bloom!

Finally! Roses in my rose garden!

I discovered these in my garden … I think they were given to me, and this is their first year blooming!

We grew a bunch of Calendula flowers from seeds and they are just now showing us how pretty they are!

This is as close as I’m going to take a picture of the big mess in the front yard!  At least the sunset is pretty 🙂

A summer peak at the garden: Peas, Potatoes, Parsnips, Carrots, Cukes, & Chard!

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When the weather is nice in Ireland, the weather is super nice in Ireland!  We were finally free to spend a full day in the garden!  I love working in the garden, everything about it: pulling weeds, gathering rocks, planting, weeding, watering (ok, this doesn’t have to be done so much here), getting rid of slugs, more weeding.  I just love being outside and being a part of a living, growing, and changing garden.    We’ve been “growing our garden” over the past two years.  It is in a continuous state of change and development!  There have been some learning experiences, too.  I have a few plants & trees that aren’t happy where they are and I need to find out what will make them healthy again, possibly just changing their location.

Our raised vegetable beds are starting to look productive.  I think the veggies are slow growing this year.  We could use more heat, for the plants and for me!  My shallots are the happiest! They at least look impressive.  Our potatoes are growing nicely, too.  I’ve taken some pictures of the baby growth of what I have so far.  I like tracking it from a young stage to full bloom.  You should see carrots, garlic, onions, and parsnips.  My other beds have zucchini & pickling cukes in them, but they didn’t get photographed.

Walking away from the raised beds will bring you toward another part of the yard,  what we fondly refer to as the Fruit Orchard.  I was happy to see the start of apples and, for the first time, pears!  Our two year old blueberry bushes are also looking very good, and are full of fruit.   We’ve put a net over the strawberries in the hopes of keeping out the birds. I’m not sure if it is good enough for this job, but time will tell.    We’ve added bits and pieces on to this garden continuously!  I think it is almost at the right size.  Our plans include a  few more changes over the next year, and then it will be “done”!

Although called the Fruit Orchard, we do also have vegetables in this section.   We have Pacific Purple asparagus, but only 4 plants have survived over the past two years.  So we just expanded that section by adding 10 Grolim white asparagus.  I know it’s a long slow process with asparagus, but hopefully it’ll be worth it!  This year my husband planted peas for me.  He used some chicken wire and bamboo sticks for the plants to grow on.  Slugs love pea plants, by the way… I visit the plants every evening to save them from being someone else’s dinner!  We are attempting to grow some watermelon this year.  Ireland doesn’t have the best climate for this fruit, but I guess I have to prove that to myself!

The final set of pictures are just showing my boxwood hedging.  I finally cleaned them up a bit.  They really needed some trimming.  Actually, I just had to take some pictures of the beds that I had spent hours weeding!  My star flower of the moment is my Allium (purple sensation)!  I love it!  I’m afraid that the garden it’s in is not thriving. My hydrangea is only now showing signs of life after some compost shock treatment, and my Japanese Maple has been ruined by being in the line of our (gale force) wind path.  Big sigh, lots more work to do!

I hope you are enjoying steps of progress in your garden, too!

Dana

These are pictures of  our back yard, including the raised beds and potato beds. I have to say that the kids have really helped in expanding the stone pathway. It’s a tedious job, but I love how it looks! (and it’s character building, right?)

Here are some pictures of the vegetables growing in the raised beds: shallots, garlic, rainbow chard, onions, carrots, and a very fuzzy picture of parsnips.

Pictures from our fondly called “Fruit Orchard”: starting with apples, pears, blueberries, and strawberries.

Pictures of our Pacific Purple asparagus, and peas.

Picture of trimmed box wood plants (in Rose garden, which will hopefully have roses soon!) Followed by pictures of Allium (purple sensation).

Strawberry Plants expanding in the garden.

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Our garden is a constant work in progress.  It was so nice to have a blank slate, so to speak, to work with when we moved in as the yard  had nothing!  We have started small, and are adding on as we go along.  We have a few fruit plants so far: strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, apples & a pear tree.   We weren’t really sure how many strawberry plants to plant last year.  We planted “a few” and hoped for the best.  Our plants have come from two friends who are wonderful sources of gardening information (and plants!).   It really is great how generous people are with their plants!  We were warned that they like to expand, and this past year expand they did! So this spring we had to adjust their area.  We added on a few rows, and removed the runners (baby off-shoots would be my unofficial description!).  My husband put the runners in pots, and they are now in our cold frame.  They’ll go back into the garden probably within a few weeks.  We’re still working on what to do with the walkways between the plants/gardens.  What you see in the pictures is a black garden carpet to keep the grass down.  It really is not very pretty.   I keep browsing through Pinterst to get ideas!  Our garden is changing and evolving all the time.  I think the perfect solution will  be clear when the time is right.

Here’s to planning for perfect solutions at the perfect time for all of our gardens!

Dana


Expanded strawberry bed.

A close-up look at the strawberry plants.

Potted strawberry runners.

An evening rainbow view from our backyard.

View from our front yard on rainbow evening.

Planting maincrop potatoes on Easter weekend.

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Easter weekend is a great time of year to really clean up the garden.  I was able to finally finish putting all of the new soil on my one flower bed, and move the sod that was just lying around in the bed.  Phew! That was hard work!  We had company coming for Easter, so I spent a lot of the weekend baking, and cleaning, and well, not being in the garden.  My husband was a real trooper and did a great deal of gardening work for me!

There was a real focus on potatoes at our house!  I can give an update on our first planting of early potatoes: the organic Colleens are just starting to sprout up!  Yay!  As for the second bed, my husband decided he wanted to dig a deeper trench for our maincrop “Sarpo Mira” organic seed potatoes.  He dug about six inches, as we were concerned that the cardboard wouldn’t be rotted through enough for the roots to grow down.  Now the roots can grow, and hopefully the cardboard will prevent grass from growing around the rest of the bed.  He also planted them a little differently than the earlies.  After he placed the potatoes in the trench, he added compost on top before covering them with soil.   We did some further reading and decided this would be a great way to feed the seed potatoes.

I’ll just add a quick word about how great it is to be able to use your own compost, and it really is easy to make!  See my link to my previous post on composting: https://mominthegarden.wordpress.com/2012/02/14/valentines-day-love-your-family-and-your-compost/

The maincrop potatoes are planted a little further apart than the earlies.  If you place them too close, you’ll just get smaller spuds.  We spaced  them about a foot apart, and the rows were about 1 & 1/2 feet apart.  This is our first year growing spuds, so fingers crossed that everything goes well!

It was a great weekend for gardening, and for getting together with family!

I hope you had a productive gardening weekend, too!

Dana

My husband, working hard (captured by my son who found photography more fun than digging!).

You can tell I’m a fan of no energy laundry drying – the laundry drying rack always seems to be in the background of my pictures!

Chitted (sprouted) Sarpo Mira Organic Maincrop seed potatoes.

Two potato beds with black “carpeting” between them to keep grass down.

A bloom from our “early” Colleen organic potatoes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s a small before and after look at the flower garden that I’ve been covering with new top soil.  The views are from each end.  The big lumps in the right hand picture are overturned sod. I moved them for another wee gardening project I have in mind!

A stone pathway between raised vegetable beds.

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Sometimes it takes doing things a few times to get it right, don’t you agree?  Last year, we put together  raised beds, threw in some soil, and off we went. “Learn as we go” mentality,  or maybe “fly by the seat of our pants” would better describe us.  As the soil settled in our  raised beds, we began to remove the stones.  We didn’t really think much of this process, and kind of just tossed them.  That’s right, anywhere.  Pretty quickly we realized that there were way more stones than we’d realized.  So we dropped them between the raised beds.  I thought there would be enough stones to  just lay in between the beds all nice and neat. I was hoping they’d kill the grass and look great as well.  I mean, there were a lot of stones!  But that’s not exactly how things worked out.  The pile ended up being a heap, and the grass managed to grow over the heap.  It wasn’t pretty, and it was rather awkward to walk on.  It was so bad, I didn’t even take a picture of it (and I photograph just about everything)!

You may notice a theme throughout my gardening.  Frugality. That’s right, I’m looking to save money where I can.  Why buy gravel when I’ve got three million stones right here in my soil? I needed to find a way to make this work.

For the past week I’ve made “the stones” a little project for my kids.  I threw down some cardboard and asked them to move the stones from the heap to the cardboard.  This was turning out to be a painstaking process of trying to cajole them into moving more than 10 stones in the five minutes that they’d dedicate to helping.   None of us were happy with the stones.   Today I made the time to really look at the project and see if this was going to work.  I decided that I wasn’t going to take any chances with grass coming through, and I put down plastic under the cardboard.  Oh boy, this meant moving the stones that were moved this past week!  I guess it was good that the kids hadn’t gotten too much done!  I had the help of my two girls today, and I have to say they really did a great job.  They alternated between shifts of moving stones and jumping on the trampoline. I’ve never seen them keep such precise track of time before!   This  worked well for us.  We managed to clear all of the “heap”!  My daughter exclaimed “Daddy is going to be so impressed!”.  Funny, she must have been reading my mind.    The project isn’t completely finished.  I need more plastic and cardboard, and actually more stones, too!  But with all of the new soil I have, I know I have more than enough stones to fill the gaps.

Happy homemade & frugal gardening,

Dana

One of the paths between the beds is tidy now.

This is where we had the “heap” of stones.

It looks nice when you can’t see the plastic and cardboard. Great motivation to get the job finished!

There are a lot of stones.

I love the sunsets.

Planting early potatoes … and raspberry plants.

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Yesterday was such a wonderful, sunny, glorious day!  It was a mild 11 degrees Celsius (52 degrees Fahrenheit).  It just happened to be Mother’s Day in Ireland, and I was in my glory working in the garden with my husband.  Our kids were a big help, too.  Sometimes, though, the pull of the trampoline was simply too great for them to resist.

We worked on the rock wall… again.  That wall is going to be a long term project!  I’ll show you pictures as progress is made.   We planted a very young Hawthorne at the wall where one of the old trees is very much dead.  My husband has been impressed with all of the work I’ve done on the wall.  Honestly though, last year when I had cut down and moved piles of brambles which were taller than myself, he had thoughts that his wife had totally lost her mind.  I think finally being able to see the wall has been a great motivator for him to join in the fun!

Today, Monday, is a bank holiday following St. Patrick’s day on Saturday.  Yay! More time in the garden with my husband!  I really am thankful for his help.   Another “top guy” is my husband’s brother-in-law Patrick, who delivered a (huge) tractor trailer of topsoil to us today!  I am so lucky to have a farmer in the family! The soil looks fantastic! With this soil we were able to plant our Colleen early potatoes.  I have quite a few ideas for where I’m going to use the rest of the  soil.  All in good time.

I have had the Colleen’s on the counter in my laundry room where the temperature is cooler.  They were sitting in egg cartons, sprouting, for about 3 weeks.  My husband dug trenches  about 6 inches deep in our preplanned “spud” area. We placed the potatoes, sprout side up, every 12 inches.  Then we just raked the soil back over the spuds (carefully so as not to damage the sprouts).  We added some new soil on top as it just needed a bit more on top of the compost & soil that was already there.  After the plants grow to about 8 inches (20 centimeters) in height, I’ll cover them to about 2 inches from the top with more soil.  Everyone says it is easy to grow spuds  … we’ll see!

In addition to planting the potatoes, we planted some raspberry plants which my neighbor James gave us.  Yes, that’s the same James who gave me the manure!  The canes were nice and sturdy.  He had his raspberries lovely and neat with rope to tie them steady.   We had some raspberry plants that didn’t survive last year.  I’m hoping that after adding the manure earlier this spring, the conditions will be more conducive to success! We used tomato stakes on the canes, planting them about 12 inches apart.  The soil should be somewhat acidic, and well drained.  Ideally, it should be somewhat sheltered. That might be the hardest part for our plants.

Since I was outside with my camera (of course!), I had to take some pictures of what’s happening in the garden.  There are some pretty little flowers forming on our apple trees.  It’s always hard to imagine the flowers forming when we just pruned them a month ago. It is so lovely to see!  Our daffodils are rather droopy after the heavy rain & blustery wind we’ve had.  Even still, the yellow color is enough to add cheer.  My favorite flower today, though, was the blue Anemone “Mr. Fokker”.

I hope you see your favorite flower today, too!

Dana

Building raised beds for vegetables.

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Last March is when we (my husband and my son) built our raised beds for vegetables.  There was a helpful program on t.v. at the time which went through six weeks of getting a garden started. It was a nice motivator to keep us on schedule for having the beds ready for late spring planting.  I had taken a few organic gardening courses,  watched the gardening program, read a few blogs, bought and read some books, done everything bar get my hands dirty.  So it was finally time to just dig in and give it our best shot!

To work comfortably in the garden I didn’t want to have the beds wider than 4 feet. The height worked out to 18 inches with stacking the wood by two.  We decided on 12 feet long and divided them in half to give us 4 plots of 6 feet by 4 feet.  We bought rough untreated wood, despite the lumber yard worker’s insistence that I needed to have treated wood.  I’d rather skip the chemicals seeping into my vegetables!  There were some stakes bought as well at the lumber yard.  It cost about 140 euro for the wood, while our topsoil cost 50 euro.   Now it was time to build the beds!

After they were built, we laid out a bunch of newspapers and cardboard  on the ground to kill the grass and keep it down.  On top of cardboard we layered compost and then put on the topsoil. We finished it off with a final layer of compost.   Voila! Raised beds ready for planting!

Since last year we added a cold frame for starting plants. We used an old door with glass for the lid.  We also added a smaller raised bed (for all of those extra seeds I bought!).