Planting a Fall Garden

We just planted a fall garden using the seeds in the picture above because that's all we had on hand.  I went to the nearest big box store to get more but I was too late. The seeds had already been moved out to make room for the next seasonal merchandise.  So I guess we'll have lots of beets this year, which isn't a bad thing since Mary makes an awesome borscht.

We planted the fall garden in this bed which I blogged about building and filling with our own experimental lasagna-gardening style soil ingredients.  The difficult thing is going to be keeping the soil moist enough for the seeds to germinate and survive during the coming heat wave forecasted for Chicago in the next week.

I solved the problem of keeping the chickens out by putting up the fence panels you see in the picture below in such a way that one of the panels functions as a gate.

The hens are a little upset to lose what I'm sure they had come to think of as their own personal box filled with lots of soil to scratch in.  I'm sure they'll get over it eventually.  All we were able to plant this spring was a little sweet corn, winter squash, and dill so I really hope this fall garden works out.  I'll write another post in the fall to show how it turns out.

Update:

I found some kale seeds today (7-16-13) so I added them to the fall garden.  I'm adding an image of the garden plan below.  It's a 12'x4' bed.

Fall Update:

Here we are three months later and the fall garden turned out better than I had even hoped for.  Keep in mind that the pictures below were taken after we had already harvested most of the beets and loads of chard.  We have been supplementing our meals from this one raised bed for several weeks now.  We have also given away a lot of chard and beets to family and friends.  I think the key to all this explosive growth has been the composted chicken manure.  Thanks, chickens!