My First Vegetable Garden - Part 3

Hello my fellow Steemian gardeners...it's time for another installment of my vegetable garden blog. I know what you're saying...,"When are we gonna see some veggies? I mean, it's July already!" Patience my friends. We'll get there.

Continuing from where I left off, I had run out of pallet wood, so it was time to find more. Like I said before, I got 16 good pallets from a flooring store right down the street from me. A literal truckload.

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After I got these, I thought to myself...there's gotta be an easier way to disassemble them. After some research, I discovered the deck wrecking bar. A double cats paw wrecking bar on a 45 inch handle. Aww yeah, so much easier. Fifty bucks well spent for the time and soreness it spared me.

It took a while to get the hang of it in order to not split and break the wood. To help with this, I wrapped each tip in several turns of electrical tape. I worked for a while until the tape would rip off and I had to do it again, but no problem because I had at least a dozen rolls of tape.

But then I said, "Shit!" Well, it was more like another four letter word. One of the paws broke off. The damn metal just sheared from the prying force. WTF?!

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After an hour of sorting and nail removal, I finally had enough wood. Back to construction. After some careful consideration, I came to the conclusion that without proper support, the pressure of the soil would overload the front wall of my bed. I needed some way to hold back yhat force. I used two deadmans. No, not corpses. I attached a 2x4 to each of the two center posts and then to a 2x4 driven into the ground. This will transfer the force to the driven-in 2x4s thereby holding the wall in place.

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Not to deviate too far from the conversation, I have a great interest in permaculture techniques...primarily Hügelkultur. This is the concept of burying logs, branches, twigs, and other organic matter in order to nourish the soil and greatly multiply its water holding capacity in order to become more sustainable and environmentally beneficial.

Well, this required a hell of a lot of excavation of the bed to be. Over the course of this project, I had never moved so much soil manually.

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After all this, I had to retire for the night as I was exhausted. The next day, I resumed construction. I decided I would now use wood glue in addition to the screws. This was probably the easiest as all I had to do was glue, stick, and screw. (Ha ha...screw.)

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