Inside Out

I was asked to post a photo of the inside of the rain barrel, so here it is:

Getting low.


This is a 10 day old Titan sunflower planted out back. It's already 3 inches tall.

Building a Raised Bed on the Concrete

Now that the gf is on-board with the garden project, she wants more crops. So over the weekend she built me a raised bed over a disused area of pavement in the back. The initial plan was for it to have three tiers, but we put 600 pounds of soil, rocks, sand, and lumber in the car...which was about as much as the little civic could take. And the soil we got was just about exactly enough to fill the first tier.

So now the plan is to garden on one level this year and next year we can dig in some compost, get a little more soil, and kick it up a notch.

Anyway, wanna see how we did it?

First we went to the lumber yard and got some planks. I spent some time chit chatting with the guys who worked there and definitely used my cute-girl powers for awesome...aka picked up some discounts.

We came home with 52 feet of 2x8s ( [2] 8 foot lengths, [8] 4 foot lengths, and [2] 2 foot lengths-- and also a scrap 4 foot piece, so really 56 feet) and a bunch of screws. That cost around $40, I think.

Then we went to home depot and got 2 cubic feet of gravel, a cubic foot of sand, 10 cubic feet of garden soil, and 5 cubic feet of organic veggie soil. If the car could have held more, we would have gotten more. I think 2ish more ft3 of soil would fill it up a little better, but it's fine as it is.


Here you can see all the boards for the first tier screwed together. Beyond the back left corner is my rose bush and behind the frame I have some sunflowers planted, but they're babies still.


This is AVR smoothing the rocks out. I helped put them in, I promise.


Then we put sand all into it.


Afterwards we added soil in layers like a cake. 4 bags of topsoil, 4 bags of organic veggie soil, 4 bags of topsoil, 1 bag of veggie soil, and then the remaining two bags of topsoil.


Then we put in the plants and watered it all. This bed has taragon, dill, basil, squash, and punkins.

Our DIY Rain Barrel

It's been a few weeks and I'm not sure where the receipt from home depot went-- but it cost under $30 and took about 15 minutes to make (and then had to cure overnight).



It's just a trashcan with a lid, a brass faucet, some caulk, a drain pipe extender, and a length of hose. Since we put it in (a few weeks ago) I haven't had to use tap water once. The drawbacks of it are-- it's on the first floor and 2/3 of my watering is on the 2nd floor, it's only 30 gallons, so it's overflowed a few times (which is really no big deal, but if it were bigger, then we could store more), and the flow from the hose is really slow. We're not sure how safe the water coming out of it is....but we figure that the water from the tap is coming through ancient pipes...so it's probably about 6 of one, half dozen of another. It's also not like we're drinking the rain water, we're just watering with it.