In my last post I wrote a little bit about my community plot and how that really sparked my love for gardening. After some reflection, I think my love for growing things actually started before that. Despite being city folk, my mother always had a garden and I vividly remember being dragged to garden centers to buy shrubs and perennials. I begged her to let me grow vegetables but she was insistent that her garden be ornamental. My 10 year old brain saw zero value in growing something inedible and I was probably resentful to some extent. When I finally had my own little garden I went all in on the edibles.
When we bought our first house in the fall of 2016 I had big dreams of ripping out all of the useless shrubs and focusing on more of an edible landscape. My mom begged me to wait until the spring to start making landscaping decisions since I had no idea what was actually planted. It was November and it was starting to get too cold to do much in the garden anyway. I was however bothered by this:
Yep…that is a gigantic above ground pool . Honestly, I don’t have anything against pools but here in Northeastern Ohio it doesn’t really make sense to have something that you can only enjoy for two months out of the year.
As most first-time homeowners can attest, you get this temporary bout of total insanity where you want to change everything about your new digs. Some folks have people to bring them back to reality. Evidently I did not because one night, the week before Thanksgiving, my husband came home from work to find me standing in the pool, wearing my dad’s fishing waders pumping all the water out into the street (which I later found out is mostly illegal).
After pumping the water out I started disassembling the pool. I really underestimated how easy it would be to break down an entire pool using only a small ratcheting screwdriver.
Left with an empty sand pit, I had the brilliant idea to remove about 3 inches of sand and have a cubic yard of top soil delivered. Instead of calling this a really stupid idea, I’m going to call it a learning experience. In this instance I learned that when your driveway is too narrow for the delivery truck to actually get up, they will dump your soil wherever then can. Below you can see that the location of choice happened to be right in front of my side door.
I also learned that a cubic yard is approximately 2000 pounds and moving it by the shovelful will take you and your incredibly loving spouse almost 12 hours. By the time I got the former pool area leveled it was December and impossible to work outside. I didn’t have much of a plan for the space anyway and I figured we would maybe plant grass in the spring.
In January (2017) is was getting really bored being stuck indoors and I started thinking about what I wanted to do with that space. I came across some images of cedar raised beds and the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of building them myself. If you couldn’t already tell, I can be sort of impulsive and when I get an idea I tend to act on it right away. I am not a woodworker and I wouldn’t really consider myself a pro at DIY type stuff so it was my sheer stubbornness and impulsivity that compelled me to borrow a truck, drive to Menards, and by enough Cedar planks to build a few raised beds.
Every now and again what seems like a bad idea pays off and what was once a pool turned into this:
This photo is from late spring of 2017 and I have done some serious work on the area around the beds since then. I’ve also built some more beds for friends looking to start gardening. I’ll be building a few more this spring for my BFF that just bought her first house so I plan on doing a tutorial post on that soon. It really is a fun project and despite not being super handy I think they turned out really great.
As we move towards spring I’ll be posting more about both of my gardens but also about how I get ready for the growing season. Truthfully, I don’t really have a master plan for this blog and I’m pretty new to blogging in general. What I do know is that I would like to focus on helping folks develop gardening skills regardless of how much growing space they have. If there is anything you would like to see me post about please leave me a comment and I’ll do my best to make it happen.
