Planter box

Guess what I did this weekend? I build a giant planter box for my veggie garden! On Saturday morning, I went to Home Depot to buy materials. I had a general idea of what I needed but not the specifics. Straight to the nuts and bolts aisle, I wanted to find galvanized everything. I ended up with stainless steel hardware (which cost twice as much) because the galvanized selection wasn’t too great. Since my budget just went up from using stainless steel, I had to improvise and try to figure out where I could lower the cost - of course NOT by cutting corners. The solution was to build a shorter planter box, 11 inches tall instead of 16 inches tall. Believe it or not, that actually lowered the cost by 30 bucks because each stainless steel corner brace cost $4! Buying wood was the fun part. I spend probably forever picking the nicest and most uniform looking wood. I bought cedar, which is known to be rot and termite resistant.

Back at home, the first thing I had to do was to cut the wood. We have this Ryobi rotating saw thingy that I have always been scared to use. I think it must be the loud noise it makes everytime it turns on. So there I was, no Bryan, but I had to cut the wood! I knocked on my neighbor’s door for help but they weren’t home. I went back to the house and stared at the saw. Grrr! I felt so helpless… Getting over fear lesson #1 - Just go for it! So I set up the saw, plugged the darn thing in, and pressed the handle while looking away. Ahhh! That was loud! I did it again and again and again until I was comfortable with the noise and the vibrating. Whew! That was close but a great accomplishment. I cut all my wood to size and then sanded them to get a smooth surface. Off to swimming I went!

Coming back energized, I was ready to build. First, I connected two pieces of wood for all four sides to make 11 inches of height. Then I attached the sides with the corner braces in the area where the planter would go. Voila, piece of cake! Next was leveling the planter on the soil - the toughest part of the project. I spend 2 hours digging a small trench on the uphill side to stuff the planter in. The end product was a leveled cedar planter box that’s 6 feet by 4.5 feet by 11 inches tall.

The next day, I spend another two hours in the morning loosening up the soil inside the planter. I had to pull out the dead roots from the pomegranate tree that was there. (Yeah, we had to kill a tree to make room for this project. I felt so bad but considering how little we eat pomegranates, how the spikes are so pokey, how we had 4 pomegranate trees before, and now we are down to two, I think we could live with one pomegranate tree.) Afterwards, I went to Home Depot to buy 6 cubic feet of top soil and 6 cubic feet of compost. Those bags were so dang heavy! I had to ask for help to load those into the car. Back at home, I opened the trunk and stared at the heavy bags of soil just sitting there, laughing at me. I did manage to carry all of them to the yard but it was painful! Dumped them all into the planter, mix mix mix and I was ready to plant!

Take a look. I have a summer squash, a bush tomato, and Healani tomato in there. Thanks for reading my boring weekend story!