Saturday, May 8, 2010

Garden Update – The Boxes are Built

This weekend, my kids and I put our shoulders to the shovel (and pick, and hoe, and portable power drill) and got the boxes built for the 'Square Foot Garden'. Friday, my wife tilled the existing garden to get up the grass and weeds growing in it and soften the soil a bit. Today, we built the boxes and got them installed.

Because we wanted to use the existing space and soil (much of it, anyway), we couldn't just build the boxes and lay them down, which is the smart thing to do. No, because I have to subconsciously make everything harder than it needs to be, we ended up digging a few trenches and burying parts of the boxes. As always, it took longer and was harder work than I thought it would be, but that's pretty normal for my life, too. Thankfully, my kids are hard workers and take up the slack.

When I planned it, I figured out how much it would cost to build the boxes with brand new wood, and it wasn't an insane amount, but my wife and I decided that free was a better price. We decided to freecycle as much of it as we could.

We already had quite a few 1” x 4” s of varying length from a previous project, so we just cobbled the boxes together out of that. Hey, the wood was free. We got it from one of my Mom's neighbors last year, it just turned out to be unusable for the original project. It looks like it's working just fine for this one. We fastened them together with an assortment of small screws left over from who knows where or what. Every wanna-be home repair guy seems to attract things like that.

What's next? I still need to build the trellises, but I think we've got enough material for that, as well. We'll be putting the soil in the boxes and laying out the grid before the weekend (I hope). I'm not sure we're going to plant peas this year, as we had planned. It's starting to get late enough in the season, and I'm not sure I want to try and put in the box we had planned for them. We'll just have to see how it goes this week.

1 comment:

M Ryan Taylor said...

Go John! This is my kind of project. I've got to get going on my garden Monday.