Step 2. Box It Up, Baby!

After contemplating several ideas from a traditional row style garden to a raised bed we landed somewhere in-between. Unknowingly, we ended up building our garden based off of the general concepts of the Square Foot Gardening book by Mel Bartholomew (it was only later when, off of a recommendation, we read the book and discovered how similar our garden was turning out).

- We didn't like the sound of traditional row gardening or how space ineffective it was and our preexisting soil didn't like the idea of trying to grow anything but weeds (despite having amended it to some degree, the clay wouldn't be very good for growing fruits and vegetables in and of itself).

- We wouldn't afford a real, true, raised bed. Building a raised bed would require about 5 times the amount of money towards wood as we would have wanted to spend and the same in soil.

 So here is what we decided to do:
We would build a 5 square foot box, 6 inches tall and fill it with an all new, ideal soil mixture. With 6 inches of perfect soil we'd be able to plant everything we wanted to plant, with a little bit of help from the partially amended soil below it.

After a trip to Lowe's, we discovered that treated wood could not be used in a garden because the chemicals to treat it would leech into the bed, despite the 15 years lifespan. The alternative was untreated wood which we were told probably wouldn't last until next year. We ended up with 24 5' planks of treated wood which we wrapped in visquin in order to prevent the chemials from leeching into the garden.

The next step was to put it all together.

and after about a week of box building, we finally brought them out to the garden.