garden box

the gardening gene is something that i did not inherit.  but when i moved in with jarad, he mentioned that he would like to use some of the space on our deck to grow vegetables.  he wanted to make a "garden box" and even diagramed one and sent me the email.  it was quite large and not the shape that i had imagined in my head.  i was thinking of two long 'L' shape boxes, similar to the herb boxes you see at the hardware store.  when i saw jarad's model, i realized this was a much bigger project than i had anticipated...although knowing jarad, what else was i expecting?!?!?

so every weekend we would write on our "to-do" list to make the garden boxes, but i think both of us were putting it off since we knew it was going to be a big project.  then a couple of weeks ago i went on a walk the night before trash day.  some of our neighbors had their trash already on the curb, and someone was throwing away a strawberry pot.  after dinner, i made jarad drive up the street to pick it up.  it stayed in our drive way for a week or so until one saturday afternoon, we were doing errands and i asked to stop at target to go in their garden department for strawberry plants.  to my surprise target does not have a garden department anymore (and i checked out a few of them).  so we went to home depot.  we left with 6 strawberry plants, 2 thai chili plants, basil seeds, yellow squash seeds, cucumber seeds, snap pea seeds, heirloom tomato plant and 2 large bags of dirt.  we found the motivation we needed from the broken strawberry pot.

jarad had some old wood in the garage, and he started measuring, sawing and building.  we have an awesome 4 x 4 (approximately) garden box that sits comfortably on our deck.  we came up with a good drainage system.  after building the box, we stapled a heavy duty sheet of plastic around the edge, but first we put a small glass candle in the middle.  once the plastic was stapled and in place, we cut a hole around the candle and removed it, making a funnel.  we placed a large plastic drip pan underneath the box (it sits on cinder blocks) so we could have proper drainage.  then gets to the fun part...

we used 2 1/2 bags of dirt to fill our box and made sure to water it very well.  then we planted our seeds.  we have watered everyday and hopefully they are getting the sunlight they need.

six days later...i woke up to this surprise on a saturday morning!  i was shocked because on thursday night i had looked at them and i didnt see any progress.  i was amazed that they had grown that much in about 30 hours, and were starting to look like something.

for those of you who know me, know i am known to kill basil.  i don't know how this happens, but i can't get them to live longer than a week!?!?!  i am guessing they are either too hot or too cold.  so you can see my basil seeds are starting to sprout too, i hope i have better luck with this guy.