We started this garden for practically nothing (only the price of seeds and one bag of dirt). The cups have been working out so wonderfully. I jst wanted to keep track of our garden as it grows…I shared a photo of the dirt I am loving lately, below.

Cave City Yellow Watermelon Planted 2/28/24, pic from 3/21/24. We saved seeds from famous melons last year.

Don’t forget! The Amazon Big Spring Sale is underway, so check out all the Spring Sale Items 50% off!

Below, you will see how incredibly fast the green beans are growing! WOW.

Garden Green Beans, planted 3/8/24, pic from 3/17/24.

DIll and Sugar Daddy Peas, planted 3/8/24, pic from 3/21/24.

Sugar Daddy Peas, planted 3/8/24, pic from 3/21/24.

Velvet Queen Sunflowers, planted 3/8/24, pic from 3/21/24.

Brandywine Tomatoes and “Tomato Mix”. Our sandy soil here in Arkansas will be perfect for them. Planted 3/8/24, pic from 3/21/24 - these took a while to show but I am sure they’re going to be great.

My fave view right now… :) I am going to put together a tutorial of how we started our little seeds soon.

Organic Sugar Daddy Peas - transplanted into a 5 gallon bucket on 3/20/24. Just realizing we may need two 5 gal buckets total for the amount of these pease we actually started.

Autumn Sunflower - planted 3/8/24 - pic from 3/21/24.

Lastly, our awesome Cave City Yellow Watermelons again, which we are most proud of, planted on 2/23/24 (pic from 3/21/24). Last year, we bought one yellow and one red Cave City Watermelon, and saved the seeds very carefully. Well that was a great idea, because soon watermelon vines will be trailing ALL over our fence!

We are in year tow of our garden here in central Arkansas, zones 7a-8b,. Last year, we started some of our garden via seed, but we started all seeds outdoors. We built our amazing DIY palette garden beds (one of which we rebuilt this year), and cannot wait to plant our little seedlings in our new garden beds once they are a bit stronger.

HERE’S WHAT WE PLANTED ON MARCH 8, 2024

Notes from the garden: 2/25 and 2/28/2024

Planted basil seeds from our garden then planted organic basil seeds from store. Also planted Cave City Yellow Watermelon (one cup grew wonderful and one did not grow at all).

3/8/2024

Planted seeds of the following: Sunflowers, Bell Peppers, Cilantro, Dill, tomatoes, peas.

3/14/2024

Seeing growth on the following: Peppers, sunflowers, and peas, cilantro.

Below, you can see some of my most cherished seedlings! Last year we went on a fun adventure near Cave City, AR. The watermelons from that city are famous so we decided to wash/dry/preserve some of those seeds from last summer. We saved both yellow watermelon, shown below, and I just started some of the red Cave City watermelons a few days ago, and I am already seeing growth on them!

Above, Cave City Watermelon Seedlings after one week, and below, after two weeks and transplanted into a larger pot.

Below, you will see one misfortune in the seedling game we are playing. Before I thought to use my plastic cups for seedlings,we purchased two type of Spinach seeds online and the Giant Noble spinach seeds from a farm in Columbus, OH barely had any growth since 2/28/24, and the American Spinach seeds I ordered elsewhere has shown less than half germination. So, perhaps it was the seeds, but maybe I over watered, or something? So, I will try these same sets of seeds in my clear plastic cups and let you all know if it is the tray or what. You never know what you are going to get!

I am wondering if it is honestly these trays or what, because most everything else I started in my cups, has been germinating within 5-7 days! Below, you can see a cup I planted our Sugar Daddy Peas in on 3/8/24 and wow they are taking OFF!

DIY Palette Garden Bed Instructions:

Materials Needed:

4 Palettes, 2 1/2” wood screws, drill, saw.

Tools We Use:

Instructions:

We cut/sawed apart a total of 4 palettes length wise, and used them to create the four sides. We used 2 1/2” wood screws to attach all the sides together. Next, we used smaller boards which were still attached to the extra pallet pieces as sides, in lieu of using weed barrier fabric like we did last year on the blue bed.

After you have reinforced the sides and made sure there is nowhere for dirst to fall out, then fill the bed with as many sticks as you can. This helps us save because we use less bags of dirt

Lastly, fill the remaining space in with bags of dirt. We like using the Miracle Grow soil if we can!

Once our seedlings are strong enough and there is no more cold weather snaps forecasted, our seedlings wil be plated outside in these beds, in an efort to have an even bigger and more varied garden than year one, last year!

I wish I had known about these exact DEWAT Tools being on sale but I provided some links to the deals below for our handheld saw and our amazing cordless handheld drill from DEWALT. They have lasted a long time.

Here is the Dewalt Drill Set We purchased last year and the rechargeable batteries are amazing. FIND IT ON SALE FOR $99.00 HERE UNTIL MARCH 25, 2024 (That is 45% off)!!

Below is the DEWALT Saw we got which is now 12% Off on Amazon - Find It Here.

BELOW, OUR GARDEN FROM LAST YEAR (2023)

We got tons of tomatoes and tons of basil (which grew nestled beneath all of our tomatoes, shown here.

Below, out first palette garden bed built last year, then the awesome GardenWerx bag and gardening tools Travis got me as a surprise last year. I could not find a link for them, but I included a few cute ideas below.