Planning, planting, and growing time

April 17th snow

This is what I woke up to yesterday morning. It made me laugh. Of course, the snow didn't last. 

Spring is here, I keep telling myself, but like any Canadian spring, it's variable until suddenly it feels like we're in full summer mode. With things as dry as they are, we're keeping our fingers crossed for more moisture, and white stuff like this is welcome!

Those big pine structures are Lee's latest project. The original raised bed garden boxes are falling apart after nine years. We cobbled them together with stakes for the last few years to buy ourselves a bit more time, and now Lee is working on replacing them. He built fourteen of them in a day, plastered them with two coats of linseed oil last weekend, and dug two in while I was at work on Monday, though he was still digging through a bit of frost. He's a hard worker, and takes extra pleasure in his efforts when we eat food we've grown ourselves.

Our old raised bed boxes have meant that our soil generally thaws quicker in the spring, holds moisture better, and they keep the soil from compacting because we only walk the paths around them. Weeding smaller raised sections works well for me, too, and I plant the boxes quite densely so we end up with more produce than I ever did planting straight rows in more compacted soil. 

Unfortunately, the wooden 2x2s we used to hold the corners of our boxes together back in 2015 were the first part to rot out, so this time, Lee is using metal brackets to hold the corners together, and hopefully these boxes will last another ten years (with reusable brackets). Or maybe we'll just go back to planting in mounds again, if we're still gardening. 

It's hard to imagine what the future holds because of climate change and drought. I find myself wondering about planting a garden at all when our wildfire season started in February this year because we've had so little moisture over the winter. But I'm trying to be optimistic, and evidence of optimism can be seen in our greenhouse:

A few of my 64 tomato plants
(some to be given to friends and family)

Peppers and marigolds

Geraniums and nicotiana

For the last few years, I've enjoyed the challenge of growing my own bedding plants -- going through the garden catalog, picking a colour scheme, ordering seeds, and starting them early. When it comes to my tomatoes and peppers, whose seeds I save from year to year, I may have planted a bit too soon, but I was in the groove and couldn't help myself. Every year the tomato plants are a bit spindly by the May full moon planting time (my birthday this year) and I feel a bit embarrassed about giving them away to friends, but they've learned to dig them deep so that they build better root systems, and they usually do really well for all of us.

I guess we'll see what kind of growing conditions the Master Gardener Creator gives us this year. For now, I'm just enjoying this planning, planting, and growing time.

That was a whole shootload* of work...

My hubby, who never swears, shocked me a little on Saturday when he used the above phrase (*cleaned up for public consumption) to describe what we've been doing these past two weekends. It was a shootload of work, but now I have the garden of my dreams!

The dream itself came eight years ago during my Master Composter/Recycler course. One of the presenters was Ron Berezan, The Urban Farmer. I'd never heard of raised bed gardening (or many of the fancy terms he used, like permaculture) up to that point, and was gardening in rows like my parents and grandparents. When Ron talked about how he raised food on his city lot, it made more sense than what I was doing. I was an instant convert, and signed out library books and started implementing some of the gardening practices Ron had mentioned. In doing so, our yields increased, and my hubby became a convert, too.

And now we're finally getting our garden to where I've always dreamed it could be. The soil for our raised beds is boxed in, preventing it from washing away or becoming compacted along the paths. The weeds that grow on the pathways won't be climbing up the sides and mixing in with the plants, and the soil above ground warms sooner and drains better. The pictures below tell the story of two weekends of good, hard labour.

First, we went out to the garden to plot how many garden boxes we would need to fill our space and still leave room to work near the compost bins.

After concluding that 17 more should suffice, we visited our local hardware stores for some 16 foot long floor joist boards, and bought the straightest ones we could find. Then we helped the guys at the store to cut our boards into 3 foot and five foot lengths using the big power saw, and carted home the pieces in our car. We took two weekends to do it, half at a time.

Below, Lee is cutting our 2x2s that will brace the corners of the boxes.

We developed a system as we went, 

doing a bit of pre-drilling and counting out screws (9 per corner).

It became like a choreography,

and by the time we had made our first ten boxes, 

we could finish assembling one in under ten minutes.

I timed us!

Here, we've got three sides of a box together,

and I'm dancing it around so we can add the fourth.

One more side to go on this one.

Below is last weekend's work set in place.

Here are the first three boxes we made this Saturday,

waiting to be placed.

Once they were all assembled, the "fun" of placing them began.

Lee amazed me with his ability to level the boxes.

He'd shovel dirt paths through my old raised beds, 

and I'd think, "There's no way this box will sit right."

But I'd set the level, and more often than not, it sat straight!

By Saturday at 6 p.m., we had all 17 new boxes placed and 

partly filled with garden dirt. I couldn't lift another shovelful, I was so tired!

The 3 yards of City of Edmonton compost (ordered from a local landscaping co.)

arrived on Saturday but had to wait until Sunday.

We covered the pile below with a shiny silver tarp, 

and joked that it was our own personal UFO.

Sunday after church and brunch, Lee moved wheelbarrows full of compost,

and our kids and I helped dig it into the soil in the boxes. 

With four of us working,

we got it all done in just under three hours. 

Thanks, kids! We celebrated by going for icecream.

And here it is, the garden of my dreams. 

Just waiting for future occupants.

Definitely a shootload of work, but so worth it when we eat fresh vegetables later this year!!

And all because of a dream that began eight years ago in my Master Composter/Recycler course...