Elevated Garden Box

Greg and I have had dreams of having a garden for a long time.  I've always been afraid that we will spend all this time and money creating it, and then we'll get lazy and stop watering and taking care of it.  I still have these fears, but we just have to keep with it.  And I'm going to be home for 12 weeks, so I really have no excuse not to get out there and water the plants.

Greg's always wanted a raised garden bed, as in elevated off of the ground.  I, of course, just wanted to get it done, so I went out and bought a garden kit that just had the wood edges and posts from Home Depot one weekend, but we decided not to keep it.  However, this did spark Greg's interest again in the project, and he decided to come up with a design on Sketch Up, and he even created a shopping list for Home Depot, so it was really easy to go and get all the materials.  We even had Home Depot help us with some of the cutting.

We started over Memorial Day weekend and thought we could finish it in 1 day.  We were super close to getting it done, but we stopped for dinner and never returned back to the project.  I keep saying "we", although, it was really Greg who went to town on this project cutting down the wood and assembling it.  I did what I could to help by pulling off the price stickers on the ends of the wood, handing him pieces, helping him mark measurements, and making lemonade.  Kind of sad.  

We parked outside for the next 4 weeks after Memorial Day weekend while the garden box and the mess sat in our garage, and then we finally finished it up last weekend.  Kind of impressive for us to finish a project in a month... :)  We decided that we wanted to apply polyurethane to the cedar in order to protect it from the weather.  We later read that this is sometimes bad for the soil and your plants, so we lined the sides with plastic.  It was also suggested to use plastic when garden beds are elevated in order to keep the water from draining away too fast because they tend to dry out since there is heat on all sides.

Abby and Chase love being part of all the activities as well.  Both of them were so tired after being outside in the sun for a couple of hours.  

We received almost all of our plants from our friends.  We picked up a basil, cherry tomato and pepper plant from our friend, John Binz, over Easter weekend, and we have been growing those inside of our house.  The pepper plant isn't doing so well, but we're still hopeful that it will get better...  Then, our friends, Lisa and Joe, gave us 3 tomato plants and a cucumber plant.  The large tomato plant finally flowered and has 4-5 tomatoes on it now, so that's exciting, and it's still flowering.  

We purchased another basil plant, another cherry tomato plant that's a different variety we think, a jalapeno plant, and a red pepper plant.  The jalapeno and red pepper plant both had small veggies and it, and they have already tripled in size and more are starting to grow, so we're really hoping to have some success with those.

And the soaker hose doesn't work quite yet.  There is a slit in it, and Greg is going to repair it, so for now we really have been good about getting out there and watering! 

So, that is it then.  The 4 corners have solar lights on them, so they light up nice in the evenings.  I wasn't so sure about the elevated garden bed, but gosh it's nice not bending over, and not to mention, Abby can't reach any of the veggies, so she will just have to continue snacking on my hasta plants.  Greg already wants more plants, so we'll see if we can create some room and squeeze some more in there.  We're almost afraid to pick anything because we aren't sure about the proper way of doing that, but we'll research it and be experts in no time!