Garden Progress

Nick has been hard at work this past week toiling away in the backyard to prepare what will eventually be our garden.  The first step was placing a fence, since we have at least daily visits from half a dozen deer and they are notorious for munching on garden goods.  So we went to Lowe's and purchased fifteen 7-ft posts and a roll of 7-ft polyvinyl mesh fencing (marketed as deer fencing since they are just about the only thing you need a fence that tall for).  Nick had already spent hours watching the sun in the backyard and picking out a rectangular section behind the sunroom as the appropriate garden location.  We grabbed some mason line to aid in keeping things straight, and over the course of the first couple days of last week he sunk the fence posts and ran the fence.  The first of these was harder than it looked, since our soil apparently is not just lousy red clay, but is in fact red clay full of rocks.  Any rocks in the way of the posts had to be dug up, and some of those rocks were quite sizeable!

 Garden plot after most of the fence had been laid.
Surviving plants from our apartment in the middle.

It's hard to tell from the photo, but once the posts were sunk, the fencing material ended up being approximately six inches longer than the posts.  The plan was to anchor this to the ground to prevent the deer from being able to just nose their way up under the fence.  Nick did not find this an attractive solution, though, so instead opted to dig a narrow little trench along the outside of the fence and actually bury the fencing (plus anchors).

 

This brought us to the next problem: leveling the land.  As you can (sort of) see from the first photo, our backyard slopes downward on a gentle hill, and that hill starts to slope about 3/4 of the way to the far edge of the garden  (along the shorter diameter of the garden, from the house towards the woods).  Seeing as how we plan to do raised bed gardening, we need a slightly more level surface for the beds.  To accomplish this, Nick plans to use topsoil from Lowe's, with brick edging along the fence to hold the soil in (and make it attractive).  

This is the basic idea.

This is turning out to be both a cheap and attractive solution and I am all for it!  This weekend I actually had the chance to help for a change, loading bricks and topsoil into the back of my car and digging a mini-trench along the inside of the fence, into which I placed topsoil and bricks.  Since the bricks can't actually lie directly up against the fence (they would just push it out, I decided to place more topsoil behind them to help anchor them in place, like this.  Nick is then putting decorative rock (again, cheap - yay) on top and just outside the fence to help hold the soil in place.  The brick and rock combination is actually pretty attractive!  We spent a couple of hours working on this Saturday (until we got rained out), and another hour and a half this morning in what was absolutely beautiful weather.  It's not finished yet, but so far it looks like this:

Doesn't photograph that well, but it looks great!

The weather is supposed to be lovely all week (clear and sunny, in the high seventies to mid eighties), so Nick thinks he'll be able to get the rest of this done.  I'm just sad that I'll be stuck at work - I would much rather be outside helping.  It's going to look so good!