The Gift of a Vegetable Garden: Part 2

In my last post, I undoubtedly left you hanging, wondering how the second part of our project ended (just kidding).

What project is that?  Well, my siblings and I along with our families surprised my mother for her 70th birthday by building her a raised vegetable garden to go along with her existing one.

I posted the first part of our project, which ended up with a lot of muddy shoes as we dug out the grass.  You can catch up on the first part here.

Now we all gathered again the next Saturday and were excited to finish the project.

Birthday Gift

We worked on building up the remaining sides.  It helped that my brother-in-law had a portable table saw, (if you don’t have one you can always have the store do it for you).

My 1-year old nephew Danny, (one of my brother’s twin boys), is just fascinated about how things work and he was wondering how much older he would have to be to use his dad’s cordless drill 😉

Birthday Gift

Almost finished with the sides!

My mother put out a blanket for the twins to play on and then the other grandkids came to play with them too.

Once we got all the sides up, we lined the bottom with newspaper, which helps to supress weeds and will break down.

My sister takes the twins, Danny and Dean for a walk around the backyard.

Here I am with my two sisters.

Okay, enough with all the family photos, let’s get back to finishing the garden.

I don’t think that there is anything quite as wonderful to a gardener then a trailer full of compost, do you?

Here is an action shot…

One of the clients that I write for wants gardening ‘action’ shots, so I try to get them whenever I can.

I love the fragrance of compost or as I like to call it “black gold”.

My niece Sofie (left), and my kids Ruthie and Kai had fun spreading the compost inside.  They kept getting higher and higher up as the garden filled up with compost.

We finished the project by connecting the garden to drip irrigation and also put up support for the shade structure.

Some of you have asked me how we did this and you can see how it was done with the first vegetable garden…

The supports are made out of rebar.  Two pieces form each support and they were bent by hand and fastened in the middle using wire.  The support is used for shade cloth in summer, frost cloth in winter and bird netting all year to keep the chickens out of the garden.

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My mother was so excited about her new garden and she fed us all a fabulous lunch that day.

Later, we celebrated her 70th birthday with two cakes….

A few of her grandsons were more then happy to help her blow out her candles 🙂

Noelle Johnson, aka, 'AZ Plant Lady' is a author, horticulturist, and landscape consultant who helps people learn how to create, grow, and maintain beautiful desert gardens that thrive in a hot, dry climate. She does this through her consulting services, her online class Desert Gardening 101, and her monthly membership club, Through the Garden Gate. As she likes to tell desert-dwellers, "Gardening in the desert isn't hard, but it is different."