Building Our Garden

As I mentioned in an earlier post, we’re trying to live a bit healthier, and buying produce boxes through Chow Locally has been a great step in that direction.  A further step we’ve wanted to take for the past few years but only just got around to was building a garden in our backyard to help grow some of our own herbs and veggies.

We had a garden in the Casa Grande house, and it was a lot of fun.  Although it wasn’t always the most successful adventure, I generally enjoyed planting different items, seeing how they worked (or didn’t, sometimes), and making recipes from the bounty found in the backyard.  When we moved out of the CG house and up north to Peoria, we set to landscaping the backyard; while we knew we wanted another garden and even designated a spot for it, the planets never aligned for us to put it together.

UNTIL NOW!

We finally found a weekend where the weather was good, we weren’t training for a race, we had enough expendable income to buy items, etc, and we headed to Home Depot.  After weighing the options, we ended up taking home 170 12” by 4” blocks to build retaining walls.*  We ended up going with "Yukon" as our color scheme.

Ooh, aah!

So much stone!

Since we figured neither the Prius nor the Subie could handle the weight, we rented the HD truck and headed home to load the blocks in the backyard.

Sweet ride.

"I'm driving a truck,

I'm driving a big ole truck."

And I left my sunglasses at home.

"Working in a coal mine,

going down down down..."

Our goal was to end with the planter bed being 5’ wide by 9’ long and 2’ high.  We went with 2’ high, as it seemed like it was low enough to allow Short Me** access to all bits of the garden, but it was tall enough to keep out the dogs.***  First, we raked the area clean of rock and ensured everything was relatively smooth...

...then we arranged the first layer of stones in an oval, under the supervision of our fore-ladies (Harley supervised from the shade of the porch).

"Dad, whatcha doing?  Can I help?"

"Thank you for clearing this area of rock, just for me!"

One layer, done!

Eventually, we made it through all five layers of stone, and ended up with this:

Voila!

We actually ended up overbuying the stone and instead of going through the painful process of returning it, we just built another planter (slightly smaller this time) on the other side of the yard.

So helpful.

We also added a piece of PVC piping in each corner of each planter to serve as stands for a shade canopy, which we might build later, as needed.  

Little planter

Big planter.

With some fill dirt taken (with permission!) from a nearby construction site.

Although we follow planting guidelines for our region of the country**** and most of the plants are sun-hardy, sometimes, they just need a bit of shade, and building one has been an issue for us in the past.

We built one shade canopy, and it blew over.

So we built a second shade canopy, and it blew over.

So we built a third shade canopy, and that one burned down, ripped into pieces, and then blew over.

BUT THE FOURTH ONE STAYED UP!

Actually, it didn’t.  We gave up by that point.

We still need to add more dirt to the planters, as well as irrigation hosing, and you know – plants.  More updates to come as we continue with this project!

Later!

Amy

* We first experimented with a ground level garden in the CG house, but the ground out here is made of diamonds or something equally hard but less valuable (Chris had to use a pick ax to put in a drip system line, for example – and that was AFTER we wet down the ground for a few days prior).  We then made a raised bed of plywood, which solved the ground issue; however, eventually, the plywood rotted away.  Before that happened, we built a retaining wall of stones around the plywood, so when we yanked it out, it spilled out to the retaining wall.  Problem solved!

** Like Despicable Me, but not as despicable.  Most of the time.  Also, shorter.

*** Something we also learned in the CG house.  The dogs love to sleep in warm, soft, loamy dirt.  Who knew?  It doesn’t seem to matter to them that doing so results in being poked in the stomach by zucchini plants or being screamed at by Mom and Dad.

**** I believe they call our region “The Mouth of Hell.”