Dirt!

Short of having plants in the ground, our garden has now gone from the realm of the hypothetical to reality. Presidents' Day was Dirt Day. Our delivery of topsoil from an outfit in Springfield, VA came and we decided to plot and install the raised bed kits we'd bought a few months ago that morning. Digging up the sod and filling the beds in one day was way overly ambitious, so we're not all done - but it's a good start.

As I'd mentioned before, we had debated what kind of material to use to construct our raised beds. While some sort of stone or brick would have allowed for the kind of undulating design my wife first hoped for, it obviously was too expensive. Finding that DYI recipe for wood preservative pretty much cinched 2x10s in my mind, and we'd bought the paraffin, mineral spirits, and turpentine we needed. And then we stumbled on these bad boys:

There's nothing wrong with the image - that label is quite faded. I'm sure these things sat in the garden section for at least a summer. At half off, they were about $63 each, for kits that made a 4x8 terraced raised bed. The boards are a generic brown, more the color of a toy log than actual wood, but whatever. They don't look too atrocious. I've seen a similar product at Costco for $90 or so.

Because this brand's boards interlock with a top and bottom cylinder at each end (joined with a plastic stake through each), they are not infinitely modular. The main problem is you can only join two boards together on a single level of the box. If you wanted, say, to box off a section and still extend the bed outward you can't.

Eight feet was also too large to fit two of these side-by-side in our yard, which is 16 feet across at the fences.

The back yard as we get started.

The only real solution was to lay out both kids in an "L," with the elbow in the southwest corner. I rough fit the shape we needed together and spraypainted down the outline to dig up the sod.

the rough layout

And here's where we started to screw up. We couldn't do, as my wife first suggested, lower beds at the ends and a higher bed at the corner because of the aforementioned three-board-intersection problem. But I only realized that after laying this shape out and marking the sod before making sure the parts of the L were square and the line on the west (right-hand in the photo) side was far enough away from the inner elbow corner. It was about two inches short, so the sod outline wasn't going to fit exactly.

If you build one of these kits, make sure you assemble the interior sections first to make sure everything will fit squarely in the end. In our case, that meant installing the board that would go between the center north-south plank and the back wall of the bed. I actually built a square first in the back-center section of this image before realizing the three-intersecting-board problem again. Good thing I'm not taking the LSAT's anytime soon. I felt pretty dumb by the end of all this.

When you're feeling dumb, brute manual labor sure helps. I cleared much of this section while Christine carved out another useless corner of our fence line for flower bulbs. Mac also lent his digging expertise.           

 The dirt delivery was seamless. Basically, a guy with dirt in a truck asks where you want it and dumps it there. We got more than we needed for just over $200. Considering we can get compost from the city for free (and we're making our own for later), the total damage for the project before plants was in the neighborhood of $350. If we can grow roughly $450 worth of produce this season we'll approach breaking even, depending on how much we have to water/if we set up a rain barrel.

Dirt delivery in a city obviously can be tricky depending on your lot. We're lucky to have a parking pad big enough for a big pile of dirt and a car and that had enough space for a truck to back up in our alley. The delivery guy was a friggin precision stunt pilot with his truck  - I was sure he was going to take off one of my side mirrors - so it can be done even in a tight space. I'd find a way to make it work even if it means sacrificing your parking space for a bit because bag after bag of purchased soil from a store will be way more aggravating (multiple trips) and more costly.

Even for us, dirt delivery was not perfect. Our entire yard is raised off the street level with a retaining wall. We had to peel back part of our jerry-rigged back fence (which is reinforced with barbed wire!?) and hand up buckets of dirt to one another from the parking slab below.

Meanwhile, the 70-degree weather of Friday was long gone and a cold drizzle started to fall. We called it a day about 4:30 with the low bed filled with dirt.

leaf mulch to keep the dirt from hardening after rain

Ta-Daa!

As we were approaching the end one of our neighbors walked by and opined on our progress. Our side of the block has unusually large back yards and ours is the only one that still has grass, and she commented how she wished she had the space for a garden, too. But were we prepared to feed half the neighborhood? Christine was kind of shocked by the idea that people would steal our veggies. I'd pretty much counted out half of our harvest to human/squirrel losses. We'll see what happens.