new garden beds!

I hope all you mommas out there had a happy Mother’s Day!
Dave and I spent the weekend building new garden beds in our yard – with lots of help from my brother who was visiting. While it was probably not the best activity in my 37th week of pregnancy, I’m very happy we got it done! Ever since we moved in I’ve been wanting to get started on a garden, and somehow I knew if it didn’t get done before baby gets here, it probably wouldn’t happen. We had originally been planning to just plant in the ground, which is what I’m used to, but the soil here has a lot of clay and stone, and it’s hard as rock when it’s dry. Mid-week last week we decided that we should do stone raised beds, and managed to pick out almost 4 tons (!!!) of stone at our local landscape store, and had it delivered on Thursday. Friday after work, Brian and Dave started hauling the rock and I worked on laying them in place. In the end, probably way easier than tilling the pottery-like soil of our yard.

We got the rocks more or less in place on Friday, spent Saturday finishing the beds and filling the them with new soil and compost, and planted on Sunday – the fun part! There were a few little chinks in the wall where the rocks didn’t fit snugly, and we filled them with lobelia and lemon thyme. I’m not entirely sure that’ll work, but I’m hoping it does – it looks pretty for now, anyway. I thought we had way more space than we could fill (we have about 5 times what we had in our postage-stamp garden at our old apartment), but we managed to fill it up quick with 5 tomatoes, 5 peppers, 2 eggplants, zucchini, squash, cucumbers and a little herb bed. I am so looking forward to summer vegetables! As you can see from the photos, the rest of the yard is currently a blank canvas, an awkward transition from our starting point to our dream garden. I think the rest will have to wait til after baby, though.