My garden

I always underestimate the amount of work in these projects I dream up. I wanted to put in a garden and I wanted a big one this time so I asked David for four 4' by 12' garden boxes. I had all the materials and cost figured out and even what we needed to do. I had it all figured out. I just was grossly mistaken on how long it would take to complete. Although the weather didn't help me out either. Mother's Day weekend we started by renting a sod cutter. That machine is a beast. It drug David all over the yard instead of the other way around.

After pulling out cement curbing, cutting down a tree, and hauling off almost 400 square feet of sod, we tilled the garden area in hopes of loosening the dirt enough to gradually slope the area. That's when we discovered that Highland doesn't have dirt they have rocks. Several wagon fulls of rocks later we finished for the weekend.

Next we started on the sprinklers. Sprinklers are such a pain. I've decided that all plumbing projects are my worse enemies. Plumbing seems so simple and it never turns out that way. I have no pictures of poor David digging sprinkler drenches but it involved breaking two picks and piercing several pipes with said picks. I was trying to help David out and went to the plumbing store with a very detailed list and I came home with the wrong size pvc pipe. I bought 1 inch instead of 3/4 inch and so all my fittings were wrong too. Luckily Ace hardware is only a short walk from our house and plus they have free popcorn. We still need to move some sprinklers but we finished enough to get the boxes in. David built the boxes himself out of Trex. That's the easy part. The hard part is leveling them in the ground but even that got accomplished. Next we lined the boxes with landscape mat, hauled 5 yards of compost into them, installed a drip line, and finally planted. Then we turned on the drip line to plant and we had a busted sprinkler pipe that the day before was not busted. We don't know what happened but David had to unplant, dig out the compost, dig out the dirt and fix the pipe. UGH!

So after all that in just a three week time period and with all the rain, I have a garden. We plan on putting rock in between the boxes and still have some sprinklers to move but we're really close and at least the plants are in. For my own record: I planted Spanish onions, 4 Serrano and 4 Anaheim peppers, 4 Big Bertha bell peppers, 4 sweet basils, 6 tomatillos, 6 early girl tomatoes, 6 moscow tomatoes, 4 better boy tomatoes (yes, I went overboard on the tomatoes), 3 marketmore cucumbers, 4 romaine lettuces, 4 bibb lettuces, and at my mom's house I planted 2 Howden pumpkins, 2 crimson sweet watermelons, and 1 cantaloupe. I am out of homemade salsa and spaghetti sauce and that's one reason for all the tomatoes. In the future I hope to plant a strawberry patch, and plant a peach and a pear tree. My dream would be to have raspberry and blackberry canes also but that will be next year's garden project. This year I'm done and David is soooo done! But thank you, thank you, David. I love my garden!