Are You Ready For Bed Time?

So where were we with the back yard?

Ah, right. We had ripped all the plants out (the healthy ones got transplanted), squared up the corner of the bricks and cut all the bricks that were sticking out so that we had a nice, clean edged, mess of dirt. Nate got all the grass out of the area and we worked on getting the area reasonably level.

Jump ahead a few days and we were here:

I neglected to take any pics of a ton of work that Nate did before we got to this point, however, you can see some glimpses of it.

If you haven't figured it out yet, we are making some pretty sweet raised garden beds. When we decided to do this, we decided to go all the way with them (and blow our little cinderblock garden out of the water). So, Nate spent a couple of days running wires and plumbing and sprinkler hoses.

We went back and forth quite a bit about what to make the garden beds out of. We wanted something bulky so we wanted big beams. Pretty much anything you choose, that will hold up outside, has some sort of gross chemicals in it that could potentially leak into the garden. Since this was true across the board, we decided to go for the look we wanted and then line the inside with thick plastic. We ended up going with railroad ties and purchased 12 of them from a local guy. These things were HEAVY basically to the point where I couldn't really help carry them so our furniture dolly got a lot of use. Each long end got 2 full beams and each short end got 1 beam cut in half. Then I lined the inside with 6 mil plastic.

To make sure everything stays together, Nate used a huge drill bit to make one hole in the corner and then 2 more one each side and drove rebar through all the holes

This gave us the frame for each bed which visually looks like me made a lot of progress but there is so much more to go.