Handfuls of Huckleberries: Gardening with the Konrads...

I have many fond memories of gardening with my mom when I was a little girl. She had a pretty big vegetable garden and planted flowers in every nook and cranny. We would eat tomatoes like apples, carrots with dirt on them, and more peas raw than I can remember. We initiated kids to the neighborhood by showing them our "red celery" AKA rhubarb and some of them even tasted it! We played baseball in our back yard with ghost runners, and got paid to pick slugs of the potato plants (If I remember it was only a couple cents per slug)!

I've been attempting to garden the past few summers with very little luck. Container gardening in apartment patios probably works if you are determined. I wasn't. The summer I met Matt, I had an awesome tomato plant that grew like crazy, but it frosted before any of the tomatoes turned into actual edible tomatoes.

Well, now that we have our own place, this is something I have wanted to do. We have a pretty big back yard, although the back 2/3 of it is wilderness (we made a fire pit up there so it feels like we're camping whenever we want!). Anyway, we put some raised bed garden boxes around the patio today. Hopefully on a warm summer night, we will get fresh smells of growing plants wafting around our patio as we share a BBQ dinner with friends or family!

Here's what we needed:

several untreated pieces of wood (no chemicals in this garden)
screws
we needed a saw to cut some of the wood, but if you know what you want and don't have one Lowe's will cut wood for you. Home Depot will not.
a power drill will come in handy!

Here's what we did:
--We planned to build 3 boxes. The first at 12 ft x 4 ft. Another at 16 ft. x 4 ft. These two will be 12 inches high, so we'll need to double up the sides. The last at 3 ft. x 3 ft. This one will be just one layer.
1. Cut wood pieces to desired length.

2. We started by assembling the ends of the boxes. We drilled the actual exterior panels to a block that works as a stabilizer in the corners of the boxes. Then we added the sides on. To make sure that the sides were aligned and stayed in place, we put another stabilizing piece about half way on each long side. (Sorry there are not pictures of these stages. I was either 1. helping Matt, or 2. attacking the weed patch!)