Garden Boxes

My husband and I have been talking about adding garden boxes to our yard for a year now.  When we moved into our house, the yard was basically dirt and weeds.  We didn’t have sprinklers, grass, curbing….nothing.  It was pretty sad to look at.  After a TON of work (mostly by my awesome husband) we now have a yard complete with sprinklers!

This is the before:  (don’t I have the best view?)

The reason I tell you this is so that you can see just how far we have come because we really still have a long way to go before it is complete.

When my husband installed the sprinklers, we needed to map out exactly what we wanted to make our yard look like so that we would know where to add curbing, a shed, and the garden.  It is a lot harder than you would think.  But, we did it.

You can see from the diagram that we wanted to have our garden on the north side of our yard and that we wanted 3 garden boxes that measured 8 ft. X 4 ft.  When my husband put the sprinklers in, he added a line to where the boxes would go so that we could set up a drip line into the garden.  He also added a spicket so that we could have a hose out by the garden/shed area.

To build the boxes, we headed to Home Depot and bought our wood.  We got the pressure treated wood in 8 ft lengths which means that we bought 9 boards that were 2in X 12in X 8ft long.  We also bought some 4X4 posts to use to secure the corners and the middle so that there was no bowing in the wood.  Last, we bought 3 inch deck screws to put it all together with.  The deck screws are a must when putting these together.  They will hold up to weather and watering better than anything else.

Here are the cuts we made.  For the 8 ft boards, we cut three of them in half to use for the ends of the boxes.  The rest of them were left as is since the sides of the box were 8 feet long.  The 4X4 posts were cut into 12 inch pieces (four per box) and then we also cut two 16 inch pieces per box to use in the middle of the boxes that we could attach and bury the ends to keep the boxes from bowing.

Now we just need to get the dirt and plants in there.  I want to make sure that we have the best soil possible for our boxes because who wouldn’t want their garden to be a success?  I have a surprise for you later this week, so you are going to want to check back.  I always feel bad that I can’t give everyone that reads my blog something, but today is the day that it all changes!  I will give you a hint.  It has to do with gardening, and dirt.  Check back, seriously.