Raised bed garden pictures

Finally, got the camera downloaded, and here's some pictures of our new vegetable beds.




We started building them mid-May: here's youngest daughter, dramatically watering her very own vegetable box: hers is the one with the bamboo tipi for the peas to climb. Notice the plastic behind the second box -- we still had fairly cold nights in May, and I tucked them in every night until right before Memorial Day.
As you can see, we naively starting the project with store-bought soil -- but we quickly realized how expensive that would get, and found other sources of topsoil and manure (see post Gardening with animal excrements).

Now forward 3 weeks, and you can see how much the veggies have grown. I've already harvested the outer leaves of the Bok Choi!







Next, here are my potatoes, enjoying a lovely to-dressing of horse manure.









And lastly, take a look at our attempt to keep the moose out of the brassica family (cabbages, kale, etc) -- Moose are very fond of raiding cabbage patches (typically the night before the harvest), so we're hoping this set-up (frame with removable mesh on top) will at least keep honest moose out of mischief -- although I fear that a determined moose will be able to "dine" if they tried hard enough. I hear moose are deterred by soap, so I might attach some bars of soap to the front of the box.
Wish us luck!