We are WAY overdue for updating you all on the yard progress we’ve been making the last couple of months…okay…more like in the last month (singular). We have been yard monsters! We’ve been working on the lawn, building new raised beds, planting the veggie garden and even building a new fence with a Goose gate to keep him out of said veggie garden. Here’s how our yard is looking these days:
And how our yard looked just two months ago, before all the leaves came in on the trees.
We had a few raised beds that we built a couple years ago on the left side of the garden and some open garden space on the right side. And in a sad attempt at keeping Goose out of the veggie garden (since his run is tied to the tree right beside the garden) we stored Colby’s canoe in the middle of the lawn to keep the Goose at bay. We’re apparently a pair of rednecks at heart.
It was a good idea…in theory….but really wasn’t the most effective solution to the Goose in the garden problem.
So now that you’ve seen our hot garden mess, I think it’s time for another Garden Hard post (read the first one back here). This time around, Garden Hard 2…the tale of the raised beds.
Endorsed by Martha Stewart herself. Not really…Martha has more important things to do than endorse our garden projects…like bake cakes for darling grandchildren, can raspberry jam with fresh raspberries from her farm, and turn the compost. Martha is busy.
After our last Garden Hard post, we decided that the next logical step in the “let’s create a SICK garden zone” operation was to build a few more raised beds in the garden space. So we dropped $100 in pressure treated boards at our local lumber yard and built a pair of 6′ x 10′ raised beds.
We’ve done the “how to build raised beds” tutorial before (read it here), so we’ll spare you another one. The only difference this time around was the size. We tend to subscribe to the go big or go home philosophy so we enlarged them just a bit and plopped them down on the other side of the aisle in the veggie garden zone of our yard.
Eventually we want to fill the entire space back there with raised beds but we’re building them a few at a time. Dropping $500-$700 on pressure treated wood all at once seemed a little crazy to us so we’re building up our garden in stages. We started with four raised beds that we built last year, the two we added this year, and we’ll probably do three or four more on the other side of the ginormous beds next year. And probably trim back the giant beds a little bit. After planting our garden, we realized they’re a bit on the too large side.
After Colby finished whipping together the raised beds (Colby whips together wood projects kind of like how I whip up bake goods…he’s a building machine!) it was dirt time. This year, we decided to go to our local landscape supply store and get a truckload of dirt. Smartest thing we ever did. It cost us $30 for a yard of dirt:
The cost is the equivalent of 10 bags of dirt from Lowes. Getting the same amount of dirt from Lowes probably would have cost us at least $100. But math isn’t especially my strong suit, especially at 10:00 at night when I should be in bed, so don’t necessarily trust my calculations.
Next up in garden bed goodness, the shoveling.
Goose helped. He loves dirt. Especially rolling in all the dirt. What Goose doesn’t like are the baths he gets after rolling in the dirt (see his foot prints in the pic below?!).
So that’s our terribly exciting, we built raised beds in our garden post that we have for you today. I feel like I should find $20 or $100 at the end of this post to jazz it up a little bit and make it more exciting. Maybe Martha really would endorse this project if I did that?!
As for the fence, I’ve got a great (okay…more like so-so) post planned for you later this week on how we built a garden fence. It was a doozy of a project and one of those spur of the moment, impromptu kinds. Those are my favorites! But seriously, who spontaneously builds a fence (as she points both thumbs towards herself)?!
Pssst…What have you guys been up to? Any spontaneous fence building? Or other spontaneous projects going on in your neck of the woods?
