Skeleton of a garden

I finally made some progress toward my future vegetable garden.

Before moving, I had already decided that I wanted to change my vegetable garden to raised beds. Raised beds have some advantages over a traditional garden, and I think they will be more efficient and easier for me to maintain.

In the interest of not spending scads of money, I bought untreated lumber, which I've used for beds before. This time, however, I treated the wood with Eco Wood Treatment. It'll be a few years before I have any idea if the treatment really works, but it cost less than $20 and I had more than enough for my four raised beds.

First, I painted the treatment on all the pieces,

and left them to dry for a little while.

Then, D and I were a box-building team. Line them up...

screw them together...

make sure they're fairly square...

and lay them out.

That was as far as we got the first weekend.

When I got back to work on them the next weekend, I could see that the wood was starting to turn gray.

The treatment will supposedly turn the boxes all dark gray eventually.

As I did when I created the big garden at the old house, I'm doing a lasagne-type thing for these beds. First, I laid down cardboard under all of the beds. I extended it about two feet on all sides because I'm planning to mulch all of that area as a path.

The advantage of having moved recently, and bought a new dining room set, was that I had plenty of cardboard. To be sure that the cardboard doesn't end up blowing around this winter, I laid out pavers (which we'd torn out of the patio and will otherwise be discarded).

Next, I raked under the locust tree, the only mature tree we've got, and threw those leaves and twigs in the beds.

Then, I threw in some wood chips that I'd gotten from a local tree service.

They're coarse and gnarly, but they will weigh down the cardboard, and be a nice base for the rest of the filling next spring.

We had some retaining wall work done recently and had a little fill dirt left over, so I divided that between the beds, too.

I was a little nervous about that, because I have no idea where the dirt came from, but it had some grass clumps in it, and I saw some earthworms, so I figured it couldn't be completely toxic. I guess we'll see next spring. Gulp.

As with most projects, this one required a new tool.

I'm pretty excited about my brand new wheelbarrow. It's going to get quite a workout next spring, when I finish filling the beds with my raised bed mix.

It's finally starting to look a little bit like a garden.