Ready to Plant a Garden!!

As we were enjoying beautiful warm weather in FEBRUARY, I decided it was a good time to get started preparing for a garden.  My boxes had been badly neglected over the past year or so.  Rachel did manage to grow some tomatoes and sunflowers but the boxes had since become full of weeds and grass.  So, I got to work with help from the kids and we started digging out all the weeds and grass.  The grass was ridiculously stubborn and took a lot of work.  We worked on it a lot over a few weeks time.

At some point I decided that I needed to get the grass away from the boxes so it would stop growing up through my garden boxes.  So, I spent a week or two removing the grass from all around the boxes and decided some stepping stones would be really nice.  Before I put in the stones though, I decided the boxes needed to be painted.  I guess you can see that my simple project of getting the boxes ready to plant turned into a much bigger project.  Hahahaha.

We got the boxes painted (at least the sides you can see from the house).  I was just using some paint I had in the garage so I ran out before all the sides were painted.  That project will be continued later.   But then I decided to put a plastic barrier between the grass and where the stones would be so we had to do that before putting down the stones.

 Once we got all that put in, we laid put the stepping stones down and David got white rocks to fill in around the stepping stones.

I also decided to add an area to house Rachel's tortoise, so she has been digging out a whole other section of grass.

Anyway, I got the compost all in the garden boxes and started planting some of the cool-weather spring crops.  I planted a bunch of spinach and was very pleased with my neat little squares of spinach seeds.

Then the dog happened!

For some reason, Ace felt it necessary to run all over the garden boxes (which he never does) and dig everything up.  Needless to say, I was not a very happy gardener.

So back to Home Depot to figure out some way to make a fence.  Rachel and I figured out how to build a fence for her tortoise home and incorporate that into a fence around the whole garden to keep the DOG out.  We worked on it all day yesterday and got it almost done.  At least the garden is now secure and we just need to finish fencing for the tortoise.  I also need to finish a few things with the fence but Home Depot was out of the parts.

So there you have it.  My small "get the boxes ready to plant" project turned into a "build a whole fenced off garden and tortoise shelter" project.  Tune in next week for my next small project... replace the sprinklers in the front shrub areas with a drip system.  That couldn't take too long could it?  :-)