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. 
 

Raising A Wet Garden... Weekend 1

 March 2011

Josh and I waited and waited for the rain to stop so we could start building our garden, then we remembered... we live in Oregon.  We really need to toughen up, so we went out in a light mist and started digging.  Since the rain is never ending we worked slowly. While it was easy to get our shovel in the ground (something in VA I was not used to) the soil was wet and heavy. Saturday amounted to about 8 hours of manual shoveling and the creation of a large mud pile in our parking strip. The soil was so wet we had to tarp the ground and place a tarp over the pile to keep it from running off... yay.  Also, I learned that good tarps are expensive like $60 a pop.

 

 

About half way through the day I began to realize how quickly you can get blisters and sore muscles.  I am clearly a big wuss.  Ditch digging is not for sissies and the repetitive motion is pretty mind numbing.   However, by the end of the day I had a pretty impressive mud hole to show for it. Cough.

 

On Sunday, with a whole new level of sore added to the equation I kept digging.  Josh started building the first two boxes.  The wood that we bought was fresh sawn so it was wet and heavy.  Most of the pieces were over 12' long so even getting them out of the garage to his impromtu back porch woodshop was difficult.  Honestly, there is not much to share on my end, I kept digging singing my own 'just keep digging, just keep digging' song in the rain to myself as neighbors passed by shaking their heads.

 

Josh had designed the beds to be self supporting he knotched each side so that the pieces interlocked and could stand together with only a few nails.  This was important because we didn't want to have to put posts in the corners.  While he worked away I leveled the ground with some sand and installed pavers at the four corners of each box to give us a level foundation. By 2:00pm he had built the first level of both boxes and we put them in place.  I then wrapped the interior of the boxes in plastic to protect the wood from moisture and slow down the rotting process. 

 

Josh came out and helped me in the next task, putting all the dirt we moved... back into the place it was before!  Lovely!  It was a long weekend without much to show for it.  However, the most important part was that we started the task. The week called for heavy rain (surprise) so we tarped everything we could, the ground, the boxes, the mud piles and packed it in for 5 days of rest.