Building My Garden

First things first! I got my raised garden through One Small Garden and am partnering with them to bring you this fun blogging experience. I'm also going to add this disclaimer: I basically know nothing about growing and keeping a garden. So this is a huge learning experience for me and will hopefully inspire others to start a garden. I'm sure I'll make tons of mistakes and have lots of questions. I'm hoping by having this blog, other people can help answer my questions or if anyone has any questions those can get answered as well.

Now onto building my garden!

The bed I have is a 3'x6'x18" GreenSpot, and is a combination of both white and red cedar. After discussing with Juliann of One Small Garden, we decided to go for this smaller, hybrid bed for this experience. The white cedar is from the southern Michigan area and the red cedar is local to the Ohio river basin. Cedar is a very good rot resistant and sustainable wood to use. 

Here's everything you need! All the hardware is included and the pieces are pre-fabricated. You don't need any tools to put it together.

If you go visit One Small Garden's YouTube page there is a video of Juliann installing a garden which I watched before I put mine together. 

Here's the hardware it comes with. Building the garden is incredibly easy. Like, Ikea easy. Maybe easier. All you need to do is screw everything together.  

 I managed to put it together by myself the next morning. It comes with a diagram on how to put the pieces together. When building it I moved it to a more level space in my backyard and got the first tier put together in no time. 

Here's the finished bed (without the trellis). I think it only took me about 20 minutes to put the entire thing together. The only trouble I had was trying to line up some of the holes for the screws, but other than that there was no headache. A tip for putting these together: don't tighten everything as you go. Tighten the screws just enough so that it's together, then go back at the end and finish tightening everything. 

  

You can really see the difference in color of the cedar. I think it looks pretty cool! However, in a few months it'll all turn a grayish color. 

Moving it back into the spot I chose required a little more effort, so I suggest having two people to help if you need to move it. I chose this spot because I'm tired at looking at the ugly cement wall in our backyard, and it's right next to the fence gate and the stairs of my deck. That means easy access to my garden to take care of it and it's in a spot that I can see every day.  

You can see how much my yard slopes here. Hopefully this won't be a problem if I decide to add more gardens. My only other main concern with placing it in this spot, is that my dogs will try to jump into the garden to get up higher to see the neighbor's dog. But my dogs haven't seemed very interested in going near the garden yet. I'll have to keep an eye on them. 

I forgot to put cardboard under the area when I moved it so I did the next day. It rained overnight so everything was a little soggy but that's okay. 

It took me a few days before I finally got the soil for my garden. And I got a lot of soil. 40 40lb bags of a recommended Veggie Soil. It was a bit of a drive for me to get, and we weren't sure if I could get it all in the two vehicles I had available to me. But we fit it all. There was a terrible storm on the way back to my house, which was not fun to drive through at all. I could barely see the road but I think being weighed down with 25 bags in my car helped me stay on the road, haha! I unloaded it all from my car in the light rain and stacked it in the side yard.

For measuring the soil for the bed in cubic feet you do (length x height x depth) or find a cubic soil calculator online like I did. 

Thankfully it wasn't raining the next day so I was able to get to work. This picture has about 6 bags of soil in the bed. I ended up using 18 bags to fill up the garden. Though once I saw how it all settled after it rained, I think I should have used 20.

I had a skid laying around so I used that to stack the rest of the bags onto under my deck. I covered them with a tarp and that's where they'll stay until I need them. I definitely got my workout lugging all the bags around. It made me wish I had a wheelbarrow. 

Here is my finished garden spot! The trellis isn't really secured in right now. It's just kind of stuck deep into the dirt. When I find my tools I'll try to secure it properly or at least zip tie it to the fence behind it. 

I had a half of a bag of this Metro-Mix 360 which I spread on top of the Veggie Soil. 

And the final touch, the One Small Garden placard.

Installing the garden was a nice experience. Being out in my backyard I was able to chat with my two neighbors who were curious as to what I was doing. One of them offered advice of where to put it, even though neither spots he said were where I chose in the end. I also found out my other neighbor was currently growing his own food and he gave me some advice. 

The cost of my garden plot was about $260.00 and all of the soil was $180.00. It might seem a little costly now (it does to me anyways) but I'm positive this will save me money on groceries in the future. And if I do move in the future, I can bring this garden plot with me.

Now all I need to do is plant some stuff so I can start growing my own food! I'm excited!