At our old house Linda had a garden.  It was a pretty good sized one too.  At least by suburban lot standards.  Since we moved to the new place at the end of 2002 she’s been gardenless.  That’s about to change.

We have clay for soil around here.  It’s no good at all for growing plants.  So we decided that a raised garden would be the way to go.  After some thought we decided that two raised garden beds in the back yard next to the deck would be best.  One will wrap around one side of the deck and the other will be a larger rectangular bed next to the first.  There will be room to walk between them on the grass.  The plan is that nobody will ever need to get into one of the beds because they aren’t wide enough to require it.

The construction project began today with a trip to Fingerle Lumber in Ann Arbor.  I compared prices between lumber companies and the big name warehouse stores.  Fingerle had the best prices.  It was also incredibly easy doing business with them.  One of the Boy Scout moms has a truck and she offered to transport the lumber for me.  (Thanks Kathy!)  So we drove to Fingerle and got everything done in well under an hour.  We drove right to where the wood was stacked in the lot and they helped us load it up.  Much easier than loading a cart, wheeling it through the store, and loading it in the parking lot!

The first thing Linda and I did was start digging.  The yard slopes away from the house pretty significantly.  That’s a good thing.  However, the garden boxes need to be fairly level.  We started piling clay up in the general area that we thought the boxes were going to sit.  After we’d had enough of the shovels, we headed over to the driveway and the power tools.  Sounds like fun to me!

We built the rectangular box in the driveway and carried it around the house to it’s intended location.  You can see it in these pictures.  The box is made from cedar 2×6 boards and 4×4 posts.  There are two boards stacked on each side for a total side height of 11 inches.  The box measures 5×14 feet.

This is the rectangular bed. It's upside down in this picture. We need to flip it and fill in the gaps beneath it.

Here's a little closer view of the rectangular bed

You can see where the other box is going to go in the following photos.

The lines of clay near the deck show where the second garden bed will go.

Stay tuned for further updates.