My Raised Garden is Built, But With a Little Change in Plans

On Saturday, my dad & mom came over to help me build & install a raised garden.  My dad was pretty convinced that we wouldn't have to do a raised garden & would be able to just dig up the yard & put a fence around it, but when we started digging, the soil was pretty wet, so I didn't feel comfortable just doing that, and confirmed I really wanted a raised garden.  Granted, there was a heavy heavy unseasonal storm here last Thursday, if you watch the weather channel you might have heard about it.  No tornadoes in my town (although there was a pretty damaging one in the town we got married in) but it did storm here for 2 hours straight resulting in almost 5 inches of precipitation.  So, the soil may have been excessively saturated, but still, I didn't want to take chances.  There were some changes made from what I was originally thinking though.

First, the location.  I was originally going to put it in the "side yard" of our house.  But, upon observing the spot for a few weeks, I was worried that it wouldn't get enough sun there.  So, I started looking at the back yard.  The backyard is typically pretty wet by the house, but out back, the yard slops up a bit & it's not as wet once you get back behind where the garage is (I know, who designs a yard like this?)  So, I thought I could put the garden back there.  The only downside is that I have to walk through the more muddy part of the yard to get there from the house.  I do have a pretty extensive plan of action to carry out though to try to make the backyard more "passable" this summer.  I just have to let it dry out a little more before I get started.

Anyway, after we dug up the space I wanted to put it (ok, mostly my dad dug it up, dirt is heavy!) we made the trip to Home Depot to get supplies to build it up.  I was planning on getting some cedar boards to just cut & assemble myself.  But we came across this kit by Greenes that was just what we needed!  It is 4ft x 4ft x 7inches tall.  Made of cedar & super easy to assemble.  The really cool thing about these is there are a few different sizes, and you can attach them to each other.  So, if next year I decide I want to double my garden space, I can get another Greenes raised garden bed kit & add it right on to the side of my current one.  The kit was only $35, so I thought it'd be worth it to buy that instead of building it from scratch.

When we got it home, my mom & I put it together in about 5 minutes flat.  SUPER easy.  We attached the chicken wire inside the garden, but attaching it to the boards with a staple gun.  Really easy.  We left a little section of it unstapled too so that I can fold it back to hop into the garden for planting & such.  Then we carried it out to the garden location.  It was at that point that we attached the little stakes to the inside of the garden to hold up the chicken wire.  We stapled the posts to the cedar boards, and to the chicken wire as well.  Then we filled 'er up with soil!  We used 9 bags & it seemed to fill it up perfectly.

Now it's sitting, waiting for me to plant in it!  I still have to mark off each square foot with some twine so that I can do my square-foot-garden plan.  I have16 square feet to plant in!  I'm so excited to see how my little garden will turn out!

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