Raised Garden Beds

I have an INCREDIBLY handy husband. For weeks, I was pinning raised garden bed ideas on Pinterest. He takes one look at a picture and pretty much knows exactly what to do. Mind baffling.

 We took a late-night trip to Home Depot which, unfortunately, was qualifying as a mini-date for us because of his busyness lately.

I'll take what I can get!

We turned this into our Science Project for the younger 2 boys that we are homeschooling. Everyone helped!

We decided on building 3 boxes that are each 50 sq ft.

There's some math, engineering, and physics involved here!

And a random basketball.

Once the boxes were built, the younger 2 boys and I grabbed some staple guns & leftover landscaping cloth we had sitting in the shed

We cut and stapled the cloth to fit into the bottom of the box, right over the current grass.
Our goal was to use the "Lasagna Method" for our raised bed gardens, adding layers that decompose over time. This gives us control over the quality of the soil and limits weeds.

Next, we dumped in about 3-4 bags of leftover bagged leaves from the previous Fall. They had been stored in our shed. We kind of missed putting them all out for leaf pickup. What a happy accident!

Leaves are a great base for these beds. They will decompose over time but provide nice aeration for the roots right now.

I also added a layer of newspaper before the leaves went in. 

The next 2 layers are peat moss and organic garden soil. I used several bags of each making the top layer all peat moss.

Of course, I picked the hottest day in April to work on this, the week we had unusual 90 degree weather!

Our next project, for another day, was to take some leftover jute string and staple it in one foot squares across the box.

More on square foot gardening next time!

The Lunch Lady