Raised Garden

A green thumb runs in my wife's family and was definitely passed on to her. Since we bought out house (and even before that), she has always wanted a place to plant vegetables and herbs. Over the last few weeks we both worked very hard to build her a raised garden.

First thing we did was collect some fertilizer. There is a mushroom farm in Madisonville, TX that will fill up your pickup truck for $25. I've heard mushroom compost is like giving your plants steroids...we'll see. Here I am next to a mountain of poo, hand loading because the front end loader was done for the day. I should mention that this was on our way home from College Station, where the night before we spent reliving our college days at the Dixie Chicken...hungover and shoveling chicken crap is not a good combination.

I guess one of the workers felt sorry for us, because he came over with a skid steer to speed up the poo loading. Minutes later we had a whole bed full.

On the way back to Houston we stopped at a Lowe's to get the rest of the supplies.

That week we spent as much time as we could after work to get the garden built. We chose an area behind the garage that had good drainage and got plenty of sun. It wasn't being used for anything and had become overgrown, so the first step was to clean it out.

Next step was to layout the garden and start trenching. The garden ended up being 16' long, 4' on one end, and 3' at the other...had to make sure we could get our mower between it and the garage wall. We also wanted the garden to be about 18" above the ground and have at least 6" of the wall in the ground for strength.

After trenching and digging the post holes it was time to install the sides. Getting everything level and plumb took some time, but was worth it.

At the end of a long day we had the first level of 2"x12" installed.

Plans for the next day included finishing construction and unloading the fertilizer. This second level of 2"x12" went up quickly since we took the time to get the first part right.

We unloaded enough fertilizer for the garden and had enough left over to do all the beds and even sprinkled some in the yard.

On the way home from work the next day I picked up a load of top soil to mix in with the fertilizer. My wife figured we needed a 60/40 mix of topsoil to fertilizer for pH or something...I don't know.

After unloading the top soil we tilled it in with the fertilizer and she started planting. My only request was for her to plant us serrano peppers in addition to the squash, tomatoes, basil, strawberries, and I can't even remember.

Here's the end product, happy as ever. Loved building that for her and with her. Even had some leftover soil and herbs to plant in an old wheel barrel we had. Can't wait to get me some fresh serranos!