It's a start

Today when I was picking up my order of salad greens from Path to Freedom, I told Anais about the first stumbling steps I've taken to try grow some vegetables. She suggested I post pictures of my attempts.

So this is a start. One thing I've learned from the Dervaes family is not to wait for your "ideal" growing situation but to do what you can with what you have now.

I rent one side of a duplex, so I'm restricted in some of the changes I can make (like ripping out the lawn or concrete driveway). I had decided that the driveway was the only place that receives enough light, so I was going to build a four-foot by four-foot box planter for the side of the driveway per the plans in Mel Bartholomew's book Square Foot Gardening.

So yesterday's adventure was to purchase the wood to build the box. Earlier I had checked one hardware store that had a limited selection of lumber, but they couldn't even cut the boards to size for me. Yesterday I went to another hardware/lumber store, but they didn't have boards in the correct width.

Bartholomew suggests six inches high for the side of the box, but that seemed a little shallow, so I wanted at least eight inches. Twelve would be better, but then the box would get too heavy once it was filled with soil.

So I ended up at the "contractor's" lumber yard, where I found an eight-inch wide board of knotty pine, which the attendant cut into four-foot lengths.

I wanted plywood for the bottom so the planter would be portable, but plywood is expensive! So I held off hoping to find a four-foot square piece some place.

My next stop was a nursery to buy makings for soil. So now I had boards and the raw ingredients for soil.