All that and a Garden Too?

So we're gearing up to get our backyard started/finished soon, so with that means I get a new permanent garden! We've designed the backyard to have a 12'x8' garden with raised beds and climbing trellises.  Today we finally started our seeds! So 6-8 weeks from now we'll transplant them into my new beautiful garden!

This is our first time trying out seeds but we've heard it can be more cost effective as well as fun to try for our second go around.  The seeds are also suppose to have bigger yields in crops. Yikes.. We will have lots of extra veggies to go around I'm sure!  The seeds are all hiding in these soil rounds waiting to spring up in the next 10 days!

I have an array of stuff I would add to this but here's what we decided on this year:

1. Sweet Basil 
2. Genovese Basil
3. Roma Tomatoes
4. Cherry Tomatoes
5. Summer Squash - Zuchinni
6. Red Bell Pepper
7. Green Bell Pepper
8. Broccoli
9. Casear Lettuce
10. Arugula Lettuce
11. Cilantro 
12. Strawberries
13. Sugar Snap Peas
14. Green Beans
15. Red Onions
16. Green Onions
17. Yellow Onions
18. Zinnias 
19. Marigolds
20. Impatients

TaDa! Writing it all down just now kinda scares me but I have an amazing layout for Square Foot gardening.   If you haven't heard of it before it really made this easy for us.  You see how much room each plant needs to grow, for instance my Green Beans need 6' in between each other so in one square foot, I can fit up to 4 green bean plants.  So you see in the plan I have numbers by everything and that's how many plants I'll be growing.  The colors are succession planting so I can harvest lettuce and other things throughout the summer/fall. 

Here's where they all will go:

This is a vast improvement from it looking like this last year, but any size garden is better than no garden at all.  It was such a treat to have yummy fresh veggies right outside our door. 

This was right after we finished planting everything but that was my little square garden.  I can't wait to get our new one up and running! (And if your wondering.. The Topsy Turvy didn't do so hot.. The tomatoes were too heavy and would snap the stems because the stems were trying to grow upward and the tomatoes of course were coming down with the weight.  We won't be doing that again anytime soon.  I also don't use tomato cages I use stakes to train them and that helped a lot, but it can stunt the growth because you have to wean off little stems that try to grow.)

Any fellow green thumbs out there? I still have my rosemary growing in the pot on the right out in the front, that's the EASIEST thing to spice up any recipe!