GardenDesk

Official Garden Desk Weight Loss Tools!

Part of Wordless Wednesday

Okay, I can't really leave this completely wordless. For the past month or so, I have been redesigning the vegetable garden and building a deck. Because of all of the hard work, I have lost almost 10 pounds! I could stand to lose 5 or 10 more, so I guess I'll just have to garden MORE, which is not a problem for me.

The re-design of the garden was a lot of physical work because I wanted raised beds but didn't have much extra soil. My solution was to till the entire area, build the garden beds from untreated lumber, place the new beds where I wanted them and shovel all of the surrounding dirt into the beds. In essence I obtained "raised beds" by lowering the areas around the beds by about a foot. That is quite a bit of digging and shoveling. I am not all the way finished, but here are a couple of pictures that I took before I planted anything (except the extra-early tomatoes):

As for building the deck, I've posted several times before about it's progress. I now have the entire floor on but I still need to build some railings and the overhead shade trellis. Here is a picture taken when the floor was about 3/4 done:

It has been nice losing weight because of these two projects, but they have delayed my garden plantings and I haven't been able to write as much as I would like in my blogs. Soon both projects will be done and I can hopefully get back to daily updates here.

Thanks for allowing me to be so wordy on Wordless Wednesday! If you want to see other peoples posts that probably are less wordy, Click Here.

Not Enough Gardening Going On; Deck Building Update

It has been a bit frustrating that I haven't gotten to plant much in the vegetable garden. Every minute of spare time lately has gone to building the deck. Many of you have been encouraging to me by your nice comments and questions concerning the deck's progress. Well, here's a photo update:

It is all framed in now, and I'm beginning to put on the actual decking! I'm really about twice as far as that last picture because I worked on it again tonight until after dark. My camping lantern puts out pretty much light!

I do get frustrated with how much time it takes, but my wonderful wife keeps reminding me that I'm building it all by myself. She also reminds me of what it used to look like. Here is the first photo we took back in March when I had just begun removing the old deck boards, followed by a repeat current photo (for comparison):

The old deck was rotting and wasn't level because it had no support beams under it. The new deck will be level and much larger!

I can't wait to sit out on it with a nice glass of lemonade and a garden-fresh bacon lettuce and tomato sandwich! As for the tomato, my extra early Early Girls are planted outside now!

The first official thing that I'm doing with the new deck (even before it is finished) is placing my other 20 tomato varieties out on it to harden off. I don't think I'll be able to wait for the deck commpletion to plant them, but I'm sure the deck will be finished before I get to eat them!