Our family garden

A few weeks ago I gave into Stephanie's desire to have a garden. She said "all I'm asking for is two 16 square foot boxes". I'm not sure if you're familiar with the concept, but basically you have a garden in an above ground box. You're able to maintain it (or so I'm told) better that way. You section off squares in the boxes and plant your vegetables in certain areas. The only problem is that our back yard has a hill. We sat down and started making our diagrams of what it would look like and what the dimensions would need to be. Then I started a list of the materials needed. We sat time aside on a Saturday for a "family project". With a 5 year old and 14 year old you know that sounds like fun. :)

We made the trip to Home Depot in our Toyota Camry. All I can say is that thing has a nice spacey trunk. It fit:

one 2x12x8
two 2x6x16
one 2x4x14
ten 40 pound bags of top soil

And some other stuff as well in the car. Home Depot made the cuts we needed for free.

Then we got home the fun began. We started to set up the boxes based on the prior diagram and all of us forgot that we didn't do so well at geometry. I think Katelyn's ideas ranked up there with the rest of ours. After struggling with the first box, the second was a breeze. And they were put together without bloodshed or yelling and screaming.

It was very cool to be able to do this as a family. Each person contributed a part in the project. I did most of the digging, Justin did most of the topsoil work, Katelyn removed most of the rocks, and Stephanie did most of the planting. Oh yeah, and as you can see by the pictures, our dog Daisy watched the whole time and kept us company.

We're still not sure if we'll have dinner to put on the table, but the project was a good time. :)

Here's what it looked like after the sections and some of the planting. We are hoping to have green beans, tomatoes, bell peppers, squash, zucchini, and sweet potatoes.