Raised Bed Gardens
Happy Sunday everyone!
I hope that you all have enjoyed this beautiful weekend! It has been absolutely gorgeous here, which is why I haven’t posted until now. We started a few different projects yesterday, neither of which I thought we would necessarily do this weekend. Only one we finished, more or less. One project was figuring out how to help the grapes on the garage. We have a plan and the lattices but we didn’t get any further on that project this weekend (maybe next weekend Andrew can do it while I’m visiting my parents?). But what we did to was build raised bed gardens on the south side of our house. I’m so excited that Andrew had this suggestion and I can’t wait to get the dirt and plants in there!
Here is our (mostly) before picture:
After making our plan and getting the materials, we needed to start executing. First step, level out the soil and take out unwanted plants. I thought this meant level out the piles from dumping our potted plants last year and take out the raspberries and chives. Apparently I didn’t do enough leveling… Andrew might have wanted to be a bit more involved in that step because it came back to bite us in the butt later. Here is my progress:
Next up was placing the garden fabric to help prevent grass/weeds from popping through. Then we placed the bricks around the fabric to keep it down for the night. Where we ended yesterday:
The fabric area is definitely larger than what we actually built, but we wanted to make sure we had enough down. When we started again this afternoon, I went through and used the garden staples to secure the fabric along the house. Then I did a terrible job at measuring how far apart the bricks actually need to be. We have one larger bed and one smaller bed. They are 3 feet by 16 feet and 3 feet by 8 feet, so I guess smaller is relative. While I was working on that, Andrew was cutting the boards for the shorter sides of the garden beds. As we started to assemble the smaller of our two raised garden beds, we ran into a problem. I am not great at leveling out the ground. While we had our bricks, our boards, and the garden fabric we did not have a level surface to build our gardens. Thankfully Andrew found a solution! We used river rock to help level out where the bricks are placed as we went. This needed to be done as we went because I didn’t measure from the correct spot on the bricks to get the distance between them correct. Oops. Andrew is a great sport and hard worker, so he didn’t get very frustrated with me at least! We started at one corner of the small bed and went brick then board, then brick until we got all the way around. When we stepped back, we realized it really isn’t level still and isn’t really squared off either. But it will be great anyway. Then we worked on the large garden bed, which went a lot smoother I think! Must have been more level to start with, since I clearly won’t win any awards for my help in this project. We took the same approach as the first bed—brick, board, brick—leveling as we went around. Next up, we added rebar through the bricks to help with stability. Here is an action shot Andrew doesn’t know I grabbed.
Our final step of the weekend was to clean up and cut the extra garden fabric. Here are our final products (minus the soil)! You can tell they aren’t perfect but I love them!
You’ll have to check out our social media to see a bonus photo from today. I can’t wait to share my love for gardening and getting my hands dirty with our future child! For now, Andrew and Goldy will have to get all the benefits.
~Natalie
