When my family decided to move to the Northeast, we looked for a new-ish house. Recently built might mean fewer major headaches: the roof would be sound, the boiler would not seize. This has (mostly) proven true. But with a new house, we also got a freshly shorn piece of land: old trees cut to make access from the road easier, generic flower beds with the thinnest layer of topsoil, and lawn, lawn, lawn. No old, fenced-against-the-deer ramshackle kitchen garden. No gnarled apple orchard. Beauty, sure, but of a sanitized kind.

So when I decided to garden, I was working from scratch. In a way, this was good. I could build the garden I wanted, just where I wanted it, in sight of my kitchen window. I can wash dishes and watch bluebirds and swallows jousting with each other over the split rail fence that surrounds eight raised beds. I can see that the broccoli seedlings are higher than they were yesterday, the arugula needs to be picked, and the lovage is exploding out of its bed.

But this vista also means that our garden is in our front yard. “If it’s good enough for Michelle Obama ...” I reasoned to Rick, who mows our grassy hillside in summer and delivers heating oil in winter. I believe he snorted at that comment. “But it’s in your front yard ...” He shook his head.  “What else are we going to do with it?" I asked, and he shrugged in defeat. “I guess that’s practical ...”

All about practical, I dove into expert advice. Two books gave me enough knowledge to get started. Mel Bartholomew’s All New Square Foot Gardening (Cool Springs Press, 2006) is pretty dogmatic, telling you exactly how to build, fill and plant your raised beds. I’m a dogma-avoider, but even so, his theory that you can grow more in less space if you organize your beds with grids instead of rows was persuasive.

The second, The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible by Edward C. Smith (Storey, 2009) offers similar advice about structuring your garden, and even more specifics about the vagaries of individual vegetables: how they grow, what they like to grow next to, and so on. The book is comprehensive without being exhausting, and its methods are compatible with Bartholomew’s. (The version linked is an update to the one I read.)

Armed, I set to work. I am, um, not as handy as I’d like to be, so I found raised bed kits that assemble like giant toys. My mom, curious to try the square foot method, helped, building grids out of wooden lathe to form the squares in each bed. (The lathe turned out to be a disaster: an inch wide, it took too much space out of the beds and weathered poorly over the winter.) I didn’t bother to use Bartholomew’s specified soil mix (compost, peat moss, and vermiculite), opting instead for locally-produced topsoil with a generous addition of compost. I did take to heart his advice about seeds, which is, basically, plant just two or three at at time, so you don’t have to spend much time thinning seedlings later.

This year, the lathe is long gone, but I am eyeballing the grid and planting pretty much as Bartholomew suggests: one, four, nine, or 16 plants to each square foot. (For example, broccoli gets a square foot to itself, while radishes and carrots are planted in groups of 16.) My beds aren’t as neat as they could be, true, but the radishes, carrots, fennel, and kale are all up and thriving, and I’m getting ready for the next round of planting.

This week in my garden:

NEEDING: The best idea I’ve seen for implementing the square foot gardening method without the bother of constructing a grid came from the blog Chiot’s Run. Blogger Susy Morris and her husband designed and constructed these beautiful planting templates, which I plan to copy as soon as I can.

WEEDING: It’s not weeds that have me bothered this week, but ants -- they have built a nest in my brassica bed. Frantic online searching has revealed a fevered garden forum controversy (“The ants are only there to eat cabbage worms!” “No! Ants actually love broccoli plants!”) and few remedies. The one I’m trying first: Pouring chilled mint tea over the ants and their hill. Supposedly they don’t like the taste.  We’ll see. At least it will cool me down.

SEEDING: The tomatoes are coming! This weekend, I stocked up on tomato seedlings from some of my favorite local growers. I adore Sun Gold cherry tomatoes, because they produce like crazy, are beautiful, and taste so sweet that even my kids (occasionally) eat them. Zebras and Purple Cherokees are heirloom favorites, and I’ve got some paste and Roma tomatoes, too, for freezing.  I’ll be getting them all in their beds over the next few days.

READING: If Smith and Bartholomew’s books are the syllabus for Organic Veggies 101, Eliot Coleman’s Four Season Harvest is the text for the senior seminar. I read this book that first year, too, and though it’s highly entertaining, I found myself drowning in information. This year, I’m tackling it again to see if I can begin to apply some of the legendary farmer’s suggestions to my own little plot of land.

FEEDING: That's today's lunch, in the picture at the top of this post; just caption it: "Why I Garden."