A Work in Progress

I've been wanting a vegetable garden for some time now and lately I've been reading a lot about the concept of "Square Foot Gardening." My problem with the typical vegetable garden is that we don't have a lot of space so the idea of getting a large amount of produce from a small amount of space with little effort appeals to me, so I decided to give it a try! We'll see if it lives up to all the hype though.

Anyway, after a lot of planning and waiting for the weather (and our schedule) to cooperate, this past weekend we finally got our project started. We're starting out small so we only built two raised beds...if we're successful, we may add two more later.



Here's our collection of supplies: boards, corner posts, L-brackets, screws, finishing nails, punch, stakes, and some finials to add a little something special.

We decided to use PVC board because it claims to be rot free. We're hoping this will reduce the maintenance on our boxes and help them look nice longer.

While reading about raised beds, several places recommended using weed cloth to prevent weeds and grass from invading the bed. I'm more than a little skeptical that it will actually work with our bermuda grass, but it was cheap and I guess it's worth a try!

And last but not least, here are the finials that we picked up. I think they'll add just what we need to these boxes.

Okay, here's the very simple process to build these raised beds. (Extremely simple for me since Jeremy did all the work...I was just the assistant!)

We built a square with 4 boards, connecting them with L-brackets and screws.

Jeremy attached the corner posts with finishing nails. These posts are mostly decorative, but they did help seal any cracks that there might be if the boards didn't get matched up perfectly.

Here's a finished corner. I plan to go back and fill in the little holes left by the punch to make these posts look a little more clean.

The finials came with a screw already attached so Jeremy just had to find the center point of each post and drill a starter hole.

I couldn't wait...I had to see what the finial would look like on!

Here's where we attached the weedfree cloth. We just stretched it across and used the staple gun to staple it to the edges.

This is our plot outside. We measured out the area last weekend and used some Round-up to kill the grass. After 3 doses, I hope we got all the roots!

This is where the real work began...Jeremy skimmed the grass off the surface and leveled the area.

Checking to make sure the box is level on all sides.

Then he hammered in some stakes to ensure that the boxes don't move.

Then, for added support, he screwed the stakes into the boards.

And...this is the finished product! Well, sort of. You might be able to see that we added another layer of weed cloth before we set the beds, just for good measure. So, while the boxes themselves are done, we now need to trim the weed cloth, lay the path between the beds, and fill them with dirt. Not just any dirt, "Mel's mix." I'll be running around this week picking up the ingredients for that.

This was such an easy project and I can't wait to start planting! Hopefully this spring we'll have lots of little veggies sprouting!