What does well in bed and up against a wall?

The fine selection of vegetables that we planted today of course! To continue a recent theme of being super productive we embarked on building a raised vegetable bed. Last year we planted vegetables in planters placed in a sunny spot on the deck however the yield was poor, very poor. I think we had a few leaves of lettuce and some baby spring onions - micro-greens if you will. This year, we shall not let mother nature slap us in the face with another paltry harvest.

Firstly we hope that by growing the vegetables in a raised bed we will avoid the drought/swamp situation that we witnessed in the planters last year. The location of the bed which mostly gets the milder morning sun will hopefully give us enough time to get home after work to water them before they dry out completely.

The building of the bed was moderately hard work but mostly because underneath the crappy grass we encountered a Kevlar-like substrate that was impervious to our blunt spades. It took much pogo-ing atop the spade in order to penetrate it but when we did it did not go to waste. We transplanted the best tufts of grass to cover dead spots around the side of the house. Nothing went to waste.

The construction was very easy. The total cost was about $24 of lumber $7 of deck screws. Here's a picture of me building it.

As you can see I'm wearing safety goggles. Exposure to gardening has been shown to accelerate the ageing processes so I take every precaution possible and I strongly encourage you to do the same.

Here is the complete vegetable bed:

One half of the bed has been seeded with carrots and something else and the back half is loaded with lettuce, kale and cabbage.