Construction Complete, Crop Planted

I've finished building the second bed, added soil, planted a number of plants, and run out of time for blogging or photographing. I'll add detail in another post later in the week.

And since I finished in a marathon run, I'm off to bed!

First Bed Completed!

The first bed is finished! It took a little longer than I expected but that was probably due to the rain we've had.

Bed Building Continued

Yesterday, I managed to accomplish quite a bit after the rain stopped. I began by cutting the timbers for the first layer and laying them out on the ground. I then checked to see if the timbers were level. They, of course, weren't level because that would be too easy. I dug a small trench with a pick and a hoe so that the one high corner is level enough for me to be happy with it. Once that was out of the way, adding layers was a simple matter of cutting them and placing them. With the digging, I was worn out after the first two layers.


Then it rained again last night....


So, today, I started the day off by waiting for everything to dry out a bit. We've had some rough storms over the last couple of days. Luckily, the most I've had fall is a couple of branches. Once the day moved on a bit, I started cutting and adding the last two layers of the first bed.


Once I finished cutting and laying out the timbers, I made sure that they were lined up correctly, checking them with a level. Then I prepared to drill through.





After pre-drilling a hole, I pounded a 24-inch long section of rebar through the 12-inches of timber using a three-pound sledge.






I then repeated the process twice more on the same corner. Of course, it can't be quite as simple as that, can it? Of course not: I had to re-align the timbers after the vibrations from the hammer knocked them out of place. But that was the only trick to it...


Currently, I'm on a dinner and blogging break. As it stands now, I have all of the timbers for the shallow bed cut and laid out and one corner secured with rebar.

New Year, New Try - Bed Building

The new year has been here for a while and I haven't done anything in the garden yet this year. I'm pretty sure that last year's container garden is completely dead.

Yesterday, I purchased the lumber I need to make two beds at 8' by 4'. I'm going to make that measurement the outside dimensions of the beds so that I can use paver stones of even dimensions of 6 or 12 inches between the beds without cutting the pavers. This is important so that my grandmother can come over and play in the garden.

I'm going to be placing the beds near the location of last year's container garden since it's the sunniest spot on my entire property. I actually used last year's containers to layout the dimensions of the garden on the ground.

Of course, I started to late in the year for cool weather crops (live and learn) but I should be able to get the summertime crops going just in time.

I haven't quite solved the night-gardening lighting issue but I'm close to a solution: I'll probably use LED floodlights and some sort of movable lighting rig.

Of course, due to my luck, it's raining rather heavily today so I don't know how much outdoor progress I'll be motivated to make, but tomorrow is supposed to be quite sunny.