Backyard Progress: Looking Like a Garden

This weekends weather finally gave us a chance to get working on the backyard again.

We had already removed the ghetto sandbox a couple of weeks ago

and had started digging up the ground where we wanted the garden area to be.

First thing Saturday morning we made a trip to The Home Depot to pick up our treated lumber for the grow boxes and landscaping edging for the area. Our "Home Depot brains" were not on though.

When we got back home and Ryan was unloading the lumber and I saw this pile on the lawn and I told him that we only needed 16 pieces to make our 4 boxes. Some how he had doubled up on all the wood, so we had spent twice as much as we needed to. It worked out though because I squeezed one more grow box in and we decided it would look and function better to double up on the wood. So we actually ended up buying even more wood in the end. Mistakes like that are usually not a DIYers favorite thing.

We got all the extra dirt shoveled up into the back of the truck.

Leveled out the dirt best we could. Put our edging boarder in and started building our boxes.

We joined them together with brackets and nails, but if I were to do it again I would just use screws because they would have pulled to wood together more. I went to The Home Depot by myself to pick these up and kinda got talked into the brackets when I really knew better. Note to self: When you figure out in the first 30 seconds that you know more than the guy working there don't listen to anything he says.

We made one of the boxes into a sandbox for Jayna. We lined it with landscaping fabric and dumped sand that we had kept from the ghetto sandbox into it.

All that hard work was worth seeing her play in her little sandbox. Even if she was emptying the sand out as fast as we could put it in. I am excited that she has something to play with now while we finish all our backyard projects.

The dirt areas around and in-between the boxes will be filled in with a small gravel. I also plan on salvaging some old pavers we dug up from around the old sandbox by placing them in front of each grow box. I am going to paint "sandbox", "vegetables", "herbs" and "fruit" on them to indicate the different boxes.

So much work just to be able to do more work.