My Husband, The Weekend Warrior

Ryan gave me the ultimate gift this weekend! It's something that I wanted to do really bad, but I couldn't do it myself since it involved power tools and man strength. So my Grandma Terry passed away back in October and I received some inheritance money from her so I wanted to take some of it and do something for my house that would help me remember her. At first I was thinking about some sort of furniture, but I couldn't really think of something. But then I found a great thing that would make Grandma Terry proud. My grandma always lived on a farm and had a great garden. She always let me go out and pick the carrots or she'd have a huge carton of raspberries ready for me when I came over(I still eat raspberries and think of her). So in remembrance of my grandma, I wanted to make a garden. I've never done any gardening on my own since I've never owned my own little plot of land so I did a little research and found the perfect thing for me to try. Many people have said that doing a raised bed garden is one of the best and easiest ways to have success with gardening and many sites had different types of construction for their raised bed. So I got a few ideas and ran them past my parents since they're good with that kind of stuff and I came up with my general construction plans. My dad took me out to Home Depot and we picked up all the lumber, dirt, and rebar and got the project going. This week Ryan worked on clearing the grass and making sure we didn't hit any water lines (we had to move the garden over twice, poor Ry). Then on Saturday he did the big build. Let me tell you, he did such a great job! I am so proud and my heart just melted as I saw him do this for me. So if you're bored of reading about raised beds then you can stop reading now, but for those of you who are interested, this is how we did it. Ryan cut the lumber at the ends so they would interconnect with each other. Then he drilled a huge hole in the ends and drove rebar down so it would be snug on the ground. The next layer of lumber her cut to just within each other and nailed the two layers together. Then we filled it with about 10 bags of topsoil, 3 bags of compost and manure, and 1 bale of peat moss. I'm starting my garden out small to see how I do and will expand later on down the road. I'm doing 3 different types of tomatoes and then an assortment of herbs: cilantro, basil, rosemary, and parsley. I am so excited for this garden and I so appreciate my husbands hard work. It all sounds so easy to do on the blog, but it definitely took a lot of time and effort to carry it all out. I am so proud!