Garden!

Yesterday, much to our delight, we spent a few hours with a friend/neighbor constructing and planting a couple of raised beds in her yard.  We've often wished we could do a garden, but have never lived anyplace where we had property available for gardening onsite and/or have never looked into community garden plots at the right time of year and/or have never thought it was worth the undertaking to feed only me while E is gone during the summers.  But this year E is home, our friend around the corner has a bunch of yard space available, and all three of us wanted to go for it!  So we did.

To make the beds, E and I had some boards available from a previous project.  I could leave it at that, but the back story is half of the fun.

When we moved here we had, as usual, a whole bunch of books.  Normally, when we move to a new place, we get several bookshelves off Craigslist (which may or may not actually look good or coordinate with one another) and fill them up.  This time we thought, "Why don't we just make shelves of our own, designed however we choose, that are big enough to hold our book collection?"  Great idea, right?  The answer is more or less yes, as long as your standards aren't too high.  Because, let's face it, our approach to DIY is a little rough around the edges - think more utility, less aesthetic, and definitely less resale value.

We decided we wanted two sets of shelves - each 6 feet tall and 4 feet wide.  So immediately after moving into our (previous) apartment, when we didn't really have any other furniture yet, we bought some boards and set to work on sanding, staining, and finishing them.  They were spread out across stacks of boxes while they dried.  And then we put them together with some pretty basic brackets and screws.

Really, the wood looked pretty nice with the staining and all, although I should note that, during assembly, we became keenly aware of all the knots, warps, and slight variations in length of these boards.  Most importantly, the finished product was big.  And with the cheap brackets, and no bracing on the back, they weren't exactly the strongest construction design on the bookshelf market, particularly once they were loaded up with books.  But perhaps that's the beauty of living in a small apartment: given the limited space, we more or less had to wedge the shelves in between, say, bed and wall, so we didn't have any too much trouble with the shelves leaning at crazy angles.

But then, last winter, we started to get ready for whenever the next big move will come.  One thing we opted to do, which we never have previously, was to get rid of most of the books.  E started listing them on Amazon, and they started getting shipped off to readers all over the country.  And eventually, the giant shelves were unnecessary, so we took them apart and stashed the boards away (in E's office, which is another story).

Until we started brainstorming the Garden.  And now, our knotty, warpy boards have a second life.

We nailed them together, covered them in plastic to try to stave off any weird leaching from the finish, and dumped in the dirt.  

2 beds have been filled with tomatoes (Roma, yellow pear, tomatillo), jalapenos, bell peppers, onions, corn, peas, zucchini, cucumbers, eggplant, lettuce, spinach, and cantaloupe, and a third bed is ready to be planted.