ACHING BACK, GARDEN ATTACK!

Before we get into the progress on our raised bed victory garden, I would like to take a moment to wish my Mom a Happy Mother’s Day.

That’s my Mom and I (I’m the baby of course.) Ever since I was a little girl, I always remember my Mom has enjoyed gardening. She enjoyed it so much that she tried (and still tries) to teach me everything she knows about gardening so that I would develop and maintain a green thumb.

Look at the excitement I had for gardening at such a young age!

One of the first gardening-related words my Mom taught me was Begonia. I would point to the potted plant next to me and say “Be-go-nia!”

Mom, thanks for teaching me to be the best gardener I can be! Happy Mother’s Day!

Now onto the aching back, garden attack part of the post…

One of the first things we had to do was remove the old garden fence…

…our new plan involves shrinking the size of the garden area and changing the placement of the entry gate…

Believe it or not, there will be a path right here and the garden fence gate will be aligned with the edge of the house. We are going to put in a rain barrel (so the downspout will not be in the way of the path) and of course, finish hacking out this lovely shrub.

Speaking about hacking out shrubs…after Jim and I had most of the fence out, we were still left with the part where that extremely nasty Buckthorn was growing…

Jim attacked the fence with the wire cutters while I used the handy saw to slice at the base until…

VICTORY! The Buckthorn and the fence were removed! This was my trophy shot.

Here are a few shots of the garden area with the fence removed…

And here is what we were left with:

What a mess! (But, better than what we started with…)

Next I did some measuring and marked the corners of the garden area with stakes. The garden itself will be 18 feet long and 4.5 feet wide. I positioned it 5 feet from the side and back fence and 6 ft from the house to allow for plenty of room to get a wheelbarrow around all sides of the garden.

Then the going got tough. I started digging…

After several hours I had what looked like a giant freshly filled grave. Nice. I tried to make the dirt as level as possible and I also tamped it down with my trusty hand tamper (more ouch) before we got ready to lay the block.

This part was frustrating. It was very hard to make all the blocks level with each other, in a straight line and did I mention they are very heavy? Jim and I had a system going. Jim used the wheelbarrow to bring 5 blocks at a time over to the garden area (did I also mention that we unloaded the blocks on the opposite side of our house?) meanwhile I tried to level one block at a time…

It was slow going. Each layer is made of 32 blocks.

Leo was supervising of course.

After what seemed like an eternity, we had the first row in place. Of course we had to take it back up a few blocks at a time to lay the  hardware cloth (to keep varmints from digging up and eating our veggies from the underside) and landscape fabric (to keep out those pesky weeds).

We rolled them out one on top of the other so we only had to reposition the blocks once.

Ta-da! Now the subterranean pests won’t be bothering our garden!

While Jim brought the last 32 cinder blocks over to the garden, I used the dirt from the area I dug out for leveling purposes to fill in the holes in the blocks. You can fill the holes with the “magic” soil mixture and plant in them, but Jim and I wanted to cap the cinder blocks so that we could sit on the sides of the garden.

Then we worked on the next layer…

The second layer went a lot faster since we took our time leveling the first, but our backs were really starting to ache by the time we took this picture…with my strong and adorable husband Jim in the photo for scale purposes…

At this point Jim had moved about 2,300 lbs of block from one end of the yard to the other, so I excused him to guzzle water and go lay down inside…

It’s starting to shape up over here!

The last thing to do (for this weekend anyway) was to fill the second level of block holes with dirt and do a little back filling around the outer edges…

…and that’s a wrap for the weekend. Let’s hope for more good weather for next weekend!