Everything is Planted

We spent most of the day today in dirt and manure. Btw, we were able to get both of those things for free through some great hook-ups. With 4 beds (4' x 8'), those donations saved us $100's of dollars.
Here is a picture facing the back of the house with all the beds finished. To see how we built these beds, check here.After filling the beds about 3/4 full of dirt and 1/4 full of manure (mixing the 2 together), we planting everything and then put shredded paper on top as mulch. This is a great, free way to mulch your garden. We took old phone books and newspaper and went to town. Actually, we even used some full pieces when we ran out of the shredded stuff.
I am planning to keep a weekly account of how the garden is doing.
Tomorrow, I am going out with the kids and we are going to start a garden journal. We will measure all the plants and record their growth every Sunday.
I will putting updates here. This may be more detail than you want, but I had a hard time finding detail when I was researching what to do. I hope this is helpful to somebody. Either way, I look forward to seeing how things progress.

This is Bed # 1.
Here we have 9 Cantaloupe plants. We are probably going to build some type of cage or cover to keep raccoons away. We have lost every pineapple to those critters in the past.

This is a close up picture of our cantaloupe plant. These are the smallest of all the plants we bought. Bed #2.
The first 2 rows are bush green beans (18 of them). The back 2 rows are green bell pepper (9 of them) and 1 tomato plant.Cl0se up of bell peppersClose up of green beans (these look like they already have tiny pods on them)Bed #3
This is all squash. We have 9 plants and, from what I hear, we will have more squash than we know what to do with.Close up of squashBed #4
This bed is all tomatoes. The 2 rows on the left (8 plants) are Bonnie Celebrity. The 4 on the right are Big Beef.We bought different sizes to see how well each does.
These are the small baby ones.These are the fairly mature ones.
The kids worked really hard during the first part of the day. Then, we pulled out the slip and slide and them have fun while the grown-ups finished up.