Since we live in a condo, we only control about 10 feet behind our back door. And we have to ask permission to change any of that.

That’s a lot of plants on the deck. It was fantastic.

I love to garden and we’ve had no space. We do have a deck that is rather wonky; the previous owners had a hot tub that was too heavy for it and now it is askew. After a summer when we used it twice, we decided to replace it with raised bedded gardens

When I say we, it is a bit of an exaggeration. I came up with this plan and David was happy to go with it. Mostly he isn’t too invested in the backyard or growing things, but is happy to build things that make me happy. Basically best husband ever.

This is David and this is his garden bed.

I always say I will plant only a handful of things and then I get too excited in the nursery and buy too many plants and go hog wild. I just needed a space that was big enough to put all my plants in it to start. Pretty much I stick to planting vegetables and herbs. Flowers are lovely but if I’m doing all that work, I want to eat it at the end.

We demolished the deck, disturbed a vole nest and dug holes to drop the raised garden beds into. Also do you see how rocky that soil is? It’s awful fill that is almost entirely large rocks.

The first bed ready to be filled!

Our original plan was to reuse the wood from the deck for the raised garden beds. However after reading up about it, we didn’t want to use treated wood and risk the chemicals leeching into our soil and our veggies. Dave got untreated cheap wood and built raised beds.

We also lined the beds with garden weed fabric to hopefully keep the chickweed out for a while.

The beds are 4 feet by 10 feet.One was just an empty box and the other had a divider down the middle. The simple box will be veggies and herbs. The divided box will have raspberry bushes transplanted from David’s family’s patch on one side and strawberry plants on the other.

Pretty beds filled with good soil! (And extra wood from the deck that we are going to use for stairs in the spring).

Since the gross rocky fill is useless, we had to have dirt delivered. (Did you know you can have dirt delivered?) A nice person in a dump truck dropped 4.5 cubic yards (over 4 tons) onto tarps on our driveway. We then moved it by wheel barrow into the boxes.

I did use the larger rocks from the fills to make pretty rock paths all along the edges of the boxes. The fill was used to level out a dip in our neighbor’s yard.

Before winter fell, I transferred my chives (an annual) into the herb box and the strawberry plants into the fruit box. Then we mulched them with straw and waited for winter.

I can’t wait until spring when I can fill the boxes with plants!

Strawberry plant we will see you in the spring!