Raised Bed Gardening

Oh, I have so missed my blog.  It has been wayyyyyy too long!!!!  I am not even sure when I was on here last, but I know that it was looonnnggg ago!!!!  I have so much to share, too!  How will I ever catch up??!!   Let's just say that while I haven't been on here, we have been enjoying life around here and the journey that we are on.  It isn't always just how we want it to be or perfect by any means, but it is ours and we have decided to make the best of it as it comes and be joyful at all times, even when we may not be "happy."  Think on that for a while, it's worth it!!!

For now, even though I have so many blog topics and posts in my mind (and my camera!), I am going to share something so exciting that we have been doing around here, in all our spare time!!!  So, get ready, here we go...

Last year, we decided that enough time had passed since we lived here, it was time to start a garden.  We planned small, just to see how it would go and actually used a small child's wading pool and placed it on our back porch.  All things considered, that went well, but this year, we knew we were ready for bigger and better!  For what we had in mind and the space that we had to work with we decided to build a raised bed garden.  Here is what we did:

We chose a spot in our backyard that got at least 8 hours of sunlight a day and that was kind of out of the way of the usable yard.  We chose a spot near the back left corner by the fence.  Next, we marked off our space and prepared the ground - dug out the grass and pulled all the weeds.  Like this:

As we brought out dirt that was no longer needed there, we took it behind out shed where there is a little erosion.  I really only mention this because in this picture of Holly working, you can see the little swimming pool that was our garden last year.  This year, it is a compost pile in the making!

The next part was to build the garden walls. Oh, have  I mentioned yet that we did this whole thing for FREE!  Yep, that's right and here is the first how.  Before starting the garden, we took apart Caleb's fort that he is wayyy to big for and never uses.  This gave us a tremendous amount of wood at our disposal!  So, the labor was free and the walls were free - so far so good!  Here are the first posts laying down and ready to go:

 Caleb and Holly decided all work and no play is no fun, so they take a break for some playtime! 

OK, the walls are built - now to fill it in!  It takes lots of dirt to fill a garden that is about 4'x8'!  Lots of trips with the wheelbarrow!  The dirt came from that pile that sits between our house and our neighbors.  He had a truckload of soil brought in last year for a planter project, he used the amount that he needed and the rest has just sat there.  We asked if we could use some and he gave us his blessings to take as much as we liked!  More FREE materials for our little garden!  So, here are the first few piles: (notice the difference between soil and sand!)

Here's the dirt pile we are working from.  After all that we used, it seemed like we barely made a dent in it!  (We are actually about to start another raised bed and use some more of the dirt this weekend!)

OK, that's all for now!  You will have to check back for the next part, adding the plants.  We are LOVING our garden!