Location location location

Patience is a virtue.

I spent the winter 2011-2012 and early spring 2012 watching the sun cascade over the backyard.  I finally took notice at the "original" and newly expanded garden location and how there was no way that I could have a successful growing season there.  The tree line shaded the majority of the area until after 2 PM and the sun set behind the rear trees just after 3:30 PM.  That explained a lot about why flowering plants grew so poorly, specifically all varieties of nightshades that I planted.  These plants NEED sun and plenty of it.  I believe "full-sun" is what the learned gardener would term the needs of these and many other plants that I so wish to grow.  After a few months, I decided on an alternate location that received approximately 6 hours of late morning to mid-afternoon sun...and now I could not wait to start planting!  

Raising the bed.

Listening to "You Bet Your Garden," hosted by Mike McGrath, ingrained in me the benefits of good soil and the disadvantages of clay soil.

A short story...the home my family now resides in has a septic tank.  This tank is buried somewhere in the backyard.  No one, including Rebecca's mother Ginny or Rebecca's grandfather Earl, the patriarch of this home, could with any certainly, tell me where the tank was buried.  Lawrence Township has no record of the location of the septic tank, and the company that would somewhat regularly pump this tank, did it improperly and poorly.  It was time to get it properly cleaned and checked and I had to locate it.  I began to dig in the vicinity of where Ginny said she thought it should be.  After approximately 21 days, I found the tank, buried 6 feet deep in clay rich soil.  Heavy, dense, clay soil.  How could anything grow here?  Anyway, tank got cleaned, riser installed, hole filled, end of story.

Clay rich soil.  If you were to attempt to deal with clay rich soil you would find it difficult without the use of heavy duty equipment.  Basically the tried and true method to amend clay soil is, to remove it and replace it with plenty of organic matter and compost.  I was not about to remove large quantities of soil, find a location to dump it and then haul in yards and yards of material to amend the existing location.  NOT GONNA HAPPEN!  Mr. McGrath would often reference "raised beds" for gardening in areas where the soil is suspect or in poor planting condition.  This seemed to me like a no brainer.  I would build a raised bed and avoid my native soil altogether.  I scoured the interwebs for a free raised garden bed plan that I could easily construct on site and found a gem on Sunset.com.  It seemed easy enough and I was all in.