Build a garden in your back yard

“My friend and I loaded up and made 3 round trips, pulled into my backyard and unloaded each time, put together cedar rectangles, wheel-barrowed bags of soil to those rectangles, and dumped them in one bag at a time. As the day wore on and my muscles fatigued I’d slam the bags of soil into the wheelbarrow, gravity would take over, and then the wheelbarrow would take off with a shaky, pale, 30-something woman tearing off behind it. After 140 excruciatingly dense bags of this, I was beginning to rethink this whole garden “adventure” and my friend was rethinking her friendship with me. Turns out that drilling screws into cedar boards and unloading a zillion pounds of manure and worm castings made “going to work” on a Monday look pretty enviable.”

“Sunday’s sunset played in the background while garlic and a collection of potatoes went in one box. And fennel, chard, lettuce, flowers, lemongrass and something else I forget went in the other. [...] I’m in love. I'm sitting here writing these words with the sun on my face and the garden behind me.”

“My adventures in gardening started in 2013. For Mother’s Day that year, my handy husband surprised me by transforming an overgrown section of our backyard into a garden, something I’d been dreaming about since we bought our home a few years earlier. With its stone retaining wall and cute little fence, the garden was built into the hillside next to our house, where it would get plenty of afternoon sun. In my mind, I could already see rows of vegetables growing in it.”