Building a raised vegetable garden

Introduction

What does this have to do with manufactured spend?  ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.  Why am I posting it?  Because:

1. I had to use up my Lowes gift cards from my gift card run.
2. It’s my new favorite hobby, which took up a lot of time in May and caused the pity party.  If you ask me now if I want to go to Lowes and buy compost for my vegetable garden or go buy gift cards from a grocery store, it’s a no-brainer.  It makes no financial sense since this garden won’t generate an $80/hr return, but you know what, some things are more valuable than money.
3. I found an interesting thing with Lowes’ return policy
4. Maybe a gardener will Google this page one day and decide to get into the miles and points game.  Hey, it could happen.
5. This one goes out to Esther who loves my random topics that have little or nothing to do with MS.

So, here are instructions on how to build a raised vegetable garden.  I’m dead serious by the way.

Step 1 – Buy or build your container

I chose to go the brick route to build my raised garden since I think it looks nicer, but most people will just buy wood planks.  It’s up to you.  I actually dug up 2 feet of dirt first (well, my buddy did, to which I repaid him with pizza.)  The reason for that is Seattle is made up of mountains and most of our soil is clay and rocks.  So I dug up 2 feet of soil and removed all the rocks.  Then I put the soil back (minus the rocks.)  Then I measured the perimeter of my triangular garden so that I knew how many bricks I wanted to buy.  The first set of bricks I bought were the gray cheap bricks (think old school red bricks but gray.) When I got them home and stacked them, they just looked too tacky.  So I returned them and got some fancier looking ones.  I placed my order from Lowes using a $15 off $50 coupon.  Of course I had multiple orders over $50.  I went through a portal that paid 5%, and I also used the Lowes GC that I had gotten at a 20% discount.  So for a $50 order, it really only cost me $50 – $15 = $35 * .8 = $26 – portal 5%.  So that was the MS portion of this post.  Here is a picture of the garden setup.  Excuse the dead grass; I’m still debating whether to rip it all up and plant native plants instead to conserve water.

Step 2 – Potting soil mix

After you’ve built your garden, now you need to buy the soil mix.  From what I read online and my green thumb coworker, DON’T use the Miracle Gro potting mixes.  It’ll look nice the first year, but it’s “crap” after that.  I did lots of research online to see what I should use.  My coworker told me to use a 50/50 sand to compost mix.  I had never heard of using sand before, so instead of taking her device, I decided to take the internet’s advice and go with Mel’s Mix, which was 1/3 peat moss, 1/3 vermiculite, and 1/3 compost.  Other sites suggested a 1/2 peat moss and 1/2 compost mix.  I had used perilite before, which is similar to vermiculite, so I just decided to go with all 3.  As for the compost, I chose a mix of chicken manure and “organic compost.”  I couldn’t find worm castings, and I had read steer manure isn’t ideal.  Really, at this point, you can decide what you want to use. You can’t really go too wrong.

Step 3 – Mixing it together

When I was putting it all together, I had read some people will put cardboard at the bottom first.  This saves you money since you can save on your expensive soil mix.  It would also compost over time as well.  So that’s what I did.  I then used a shovel to “stir” everything together.  Pics:

 

Finished product after an hour of mixing:

First plants.  

As you can see, I went with 8 tomato plants (too many really), 3 jalapeno plants, 2 beats, an onion plant, and you can’t see the 2 rows of carrots.

6 Weeks Later

Conclusion

How much did all this cost me?   Nearly $200 after all discounts.  Could I have bought 2-3 years worth of vegetables with that money?  YUP!  Will I enjoy eating my organic home grown vegetables more than the store?  YUP!  Can you put a price on that love?  NOPE.

By the way, you should also learn how to prune tomato plants so that your plants grow more fruit than leaves.  Here is a good wikihow article on it.

I think my next step is to set up a drip watering system; don’t worry, I won’t blog about that.  Just know that would be the next step.  Oh yeah, I also need to get or buy some earthworms and throw them in the vegetable garden.  For next year, I’ll just till the soil, add compost, and re-plant.  I had a patio garden last year that grew great; this year, I didn’t do anything but plant and the yield is terrible, so make sure you add compost annually.

Oh yeah, I also learned that when you return an item to Lowe’s that was paid for with a gift card and a discount code, they have to take your driver’s license and will refund you the full regular price amount back to a gift card.  Similar to almost returning without a receipt.  It’s very odd.  I had to do this 3 times in a span of a month.  I don’t know what the limits are with this, but I’m sure there is since they are notating your driver’s license.  I wouldn’t abuse this; I just found it odd that they didn’t think through this scenario.