Raising A Garden... Weekend 2

March 2011

Josh and I had started all of our seeds indoors and they were GROWING, we woke up early on Saturday so we could get moving.   The goal for the weekend was to complete the boxes and fill them with compost/soil.  Considering all we did the first weekend was move dirt from one area to another we knew this was easier said then done.

 

Josh got back to work on his patio workshop and I started leveling the area for our long beds.  We had managed to have a few early hours without rain and moved quickly.  To make the beds more interesting we ran a 2"x4" banding strip 24" up.  This has no purpose other then decorative but I think it was worth it. These are just for growing plants but they are also in our front yard.  Since we never take pictures of actual people you will have to use Gus as a scale object.  The beds are about 40" tall at the side walk and up by the house are only 14" tall.  This allowed us to negotiate the hillside and provide different heights for all of our different plants.  We created a stacked cap using a 2"x4" and a 2"x6".  We did this for two reasons, one purely decorative again, and two, for a place to rest tools when working.

By Saturday, we had finished the right side of the boxes.  On Sunday, Josh got to work on the left side while I went to the garden store for 15 bags of top soil and compost.  As you can see by the last picture we didn't finish until very late on Sunday. The caps were actually pretty hard, Josh mitred the corners together.  This would have been easier if we weren't using a hand held circular saw. Tools... you never seem to have the perfect one... 

In the end, we felt pretty good about our progress.  In total we had made 2- 3'x3' beds, 2- 3' x 8' beds and 1- 3' x 6' bed.  In all we created  84 sq ft of raised planting area... not to shabby.  We hoped the following weekend would be a little easier.  We still needed to install some sort of steps, pathway, and landscaping.