My first "Serious" Veggie Garden

Like everyone, I have grown tomatoes and tried cucumbers and green beans but this year, after not having a garden for a few (due to a Dachshund named Willy who loves to eat things, all things) we decided to get serious. We are also trying to cut down on our purchasing of foods from far away and heck, this is as close as it gets! So I asked my husband for an 8x12 foot raised bed. It's too small, you're going to want it bigger, he said. We got the wood (cedar, "it's got to last" he said), we got the soil (triple mix since we're on sand and needed fresh stuff), we got the plants, he built this garden, lined it with weed fabric to keep our triple mix in place, build elaborate lift away sides so that it is bunny, gopher and weiner dog proof and we were off to a fine start.
Of course, being fairly new at this I packed everything in a bit too close (you look at those tiny seedlings and forget how big one tomato plant gets! especially after all the rain the Southern Ontario region has been getting)but even stil it looked sparse compared to this photo, taken about late June.

Two weeks later, still growing:

And the first meal of all veggies from the garden was tonight and included these beauties!

We're thrilled with it's progress and since we had extra soil and a bit more ambition we put some things that the bunny will hopefully leave alone into a separate bed, not so raised and not so fancy and it is full too!
Lesson #1 Always leave the recommended amount of space between rows! Someone has recommended it for a good reason....

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We have beets, carrots, green peppers (5 plants), brussells sprouts (4), snap peas (2 small rows, about 16 plants, next year I'll do twice that amount), snow peas (an 8 foot row of them spaced about 6 inches, good harvest from them so far and many more blooms to come), 2 grape tomatoes (red), 2 regular tomatoes (can't remember the strain) and 7 green bean bush plants.
The second "overflow" garden has 4 more tomato plants, our older raspberries, 5 enormous zucchini plants (yikes! Harrowsmith said something funny in their top 100 reasons to live in the country...."You can pass off your oversized zucchini to unknowing city folk who drop by and want some of your garden produce".) with at least 20 blooms each.

That's it! The secret this year must be the soil and we've had sooo much rain. Today is sunny finally and I'm really hoping some of the grape tomatoes will ripen up soon.