Raised beds.

I'm considering renaming this blog "Inder Works On Her Backyard."

Um, so building raised beds and filling them with soil is a huge amount of work. Who knew? I can feel every muscle in my body right now ... separately. But thank goodness for three day weekends. We were able to order all of the supplies for, and then build and fill three large beds this past weekend.

Here is Steve, trying to figure out how to build raised beds without having a level surface to work on. Luckily, I married a really handy, resourceful guy. (Most of the work was done with the beds up on their sides.)

Joe thought the lumber was perfect for pushing trucks on.

Steve and Harpal built the first two boxes, and positioned them, but then we had to dig into the slight incline in our garden to get the beds level.

Beds in place but not level yet.

Then we lined them with plastic, hoping that this would protect the wood for a bit longer and prevent water and dirt from seeping through the cracks.

Level and lined with plastic.

Then there was a long interval that I have no record of, except the memory currently imprinted in my shoulder muscles. It took ten wheel barrow loads of topsoil to fill each bed. Harpal and Steve filled up the wheel barrow and dumped the dirt, and then I tried to flatten it out (they gave the pregnant girl the comparatively "easy" job). By the end of this, we were all sweating and gasping a bit. We only had to move the topsoil from our driveway (where we got a big delivery of soil) to the backyard, but this was definitely the hardest part of the whole process.

This is so much harder than it looks.

Public Service Announcement: Do not try to fill raised beds of this size (or even much smaller beds) with bags of soil from the hardware store or garden center. I can't even imagine how many bags of soil it would take and how much that would cost. Each of these beds used about a cubic yard of topsoil. Getting the big delivery was definitely the way to go. And I hear the soil will settle a lot over the first six months or so and require even more soil to really fill it up.

Tired pregnant lady, squinting.

We're also going to add some boards to the short ends of these boxes to use as little benches to sit on while gardening or watching the kiddos. It's going to be sweet. 

(And yes, I do love Oakland. Most days. Even though the Oakland Narcotics Task Force were swarming all over our yard just last week looking for someone who bolted when they tried to serve a warrant on him. You won't catch me saying "hella," however.)

A belly shot where you can't really see my belly. I'm a little more than 18 weeks along now.

We also built and filled another bed in the very back of the garden, but at that point, I was sweating and gasping too much to bother photographing the whole process. I'm sure I'll be sharing photos of all of the beds later.

The final bed, in the back of the garden.

So very tired. But pleased too.