Building Beds...

My friend Kathryn wrote a few weeks ago to tell me she was coming to visit and to get a "project" ready. When she arrived we almost immediately set out to buy the materials needed to build raised beds for this year's garden. After a few hours of digging and raking we leveled off an old garden patch in the backyard. Kathryn is pictured here standing behind our work.



Next came the container construction. After torturing the guy at the lumber yard for 5 12' boards of fir (the fir boards were at the bottom of a very tall stack of spruce which he had to move by hand), we coaxed my landlord into handsawing one of the boards into 3' pieces. Then we drilled them together, putting stakes in each of the corners to hold the box in the ground.



Next came the filling. We started with a solid layer of last year's leaves which were convienently still frozen in the compost pile. We followed them with several inches of compost - all hand shoveled into the beds. Owen was in heaven thinking we had just created two enormous dirt boxes just for him.


Here he is moving the dirt around with his hands. He was so excited that he kept putting his hands near his mouth giving himself a cute little soul patch. Needless to say baths have become a mandatory end of the day activity at our house.