Garden 101 cont....

Strawberries are fine and all, but I need more!

But what to do? Before I was limited (yes, one of my excuses) because I was just a renter.... but THIS, this is MY house, and I can do what I want! Right? Right! So I decided to build a raised garden bed. I mulled around different ideas, rock walls, cinder block, pressure treated wood, but finally settled on redwood. The kids and I spent a lot of time walking the aisles at Home Depot and Lowes. I even walked around taking pictures of price tags and wood with my phone. *rolling eyes* I had some strange excitement building up inside me, and pictures of planks of wood on my cell phone was some how going to help. Lol

My 'advisers' let me know it was time! Time to do some real shopping... so Advisor 1 and I headed off to Home Depot (only after doing much price comparisons online) and bought the wood... oh, and nails. Whew! Step one complete. I'm on my way!

Advisor 2 picked up the wood and dropped it off at the house. Zack and I arrived just as Danny unloaded the last of the wood. Now it was our turn to get our hands dirty. We had to move it to the backyard.

There's my big helper carrying a 2x4x8' all the way to the back yard!

As you can see this was not a short jaunt for this laborer!

But soon enough the two of us had all of the lumber in the backyard. Perfect pieces of redwood to create 2 4'x16'x12" garden boxes.

But apparently the wood is not JUST for garden boxes.

These made for a great race track. In fact, the wood sat outside for a couple of weeks and the kids found many uses for these, including but not limited to, race tracks, balance beams, tight ropes and believe it or not, jump ropes.

So after all the wood was moved to the back, I decided to walk around and take some before pictures of the back yard. The yard had actually not started it's 'jungle phase' as of yet, so it doesn't look too bad in these pictures, but soon enough the weeds grew and grew. Below are/were my sheds *sigh*, more on that later.

The previous owner had these random shrubs and rose bushes throughout the back yard, with no rhyme or reason, well none that I could figure out anyway. But my rose bush patience was completely spent with the last place I lived, so they HAD to go! Luckily the young men needed a service project so I promptly offered up my yard!

Rose bushes gone! yippie!

Along side the fence were these Heathers and a random boxwood, just one *shaking head*, don't ask me, but the real puzzler was the cactus. When I moved in that cactus was three feet above the fence line and about 15 feet wide! No kidding! The thing was a monster! We hacked away at that thing, but it had 9 lives. It just kept coming back. In the picture below you can just make out the remaining stumps, but before the stumps were actually removed it produced cactus paddles 3 feet long!

*note to self: NEVER ever plant a cactus!*

So now the real work begins, no, not the labor.... the 'Bonnie's got to make up her mind' part, and that was hard. Just where is everything going to go? Let's think about that.....