Garden Journal, Container Garden Prep Work

Hello, hivers! Welcome to da garden, eh!

I didn't start out the day with plans to work on my container garden, but that's how the day turned out. I had planned on working on rebuilding one of my raised beds and needed a place to put the extra dirt, and things just kind of went sideways from there.

This is the garden bed I was working on. I decided to shorten it to make access to the water storage tank easier. At the far end of the raised bed is my old compost pile. I wanted to remove that entirely. You can see how I put a divider in the middle of the raised bed to shorten it. That spot is where the long boards met in the middle, so it was a convenient place to put a new end board.

Since the dirt in the raised bed is really good, I wanted to use it somewhere else, so I decided to use it to fill the empty containers. That led to setting up the container garden to get it ready for planting season. It was kind of still a mess from last fall. I had already started filling up a container when I remembered to take this picture. The strawberry bed in front of the containers is more grass than strawberry plants now. It needs to be reworked at some point.

After that, I decided to clean up all the stuff covering up the big pots at the end of the container garden. Then I decided to put the saucers back under the 4 big pots. That required a bit of help to lift the pots. I had removed the saucers last fall so that they wouldn't be full of ice all winter.

All of the saucers in place. I need to paint those two black pots. The white paint helps to keep the sun from heating up the dirt in the pots too much. The paint job on the other two pots is pretty crappy because the nozzle on the spray can was bad when I painted them last year.

After that was done, I continued filling the containers with the dirt from the raised bed. I also topped off the 4 big pots, mixing the raised bed dirt in with the potting soil with the shovel. Now these will be ready for planting once the weather is warm enough. I'll be growing my green beans in these containers this year.

I also did more work on the raised bed that I was changing, as part of the process of moving the dirt. This is the shortened bed after I finished working on it.

This is the remains of the rest of the bed that I took apart.

That was as far as I got with the project today. If it doesn't rain tomorrow, I'll get more work done in this area. I still have more dirt to move, and then removal of the last parts of that section of the bed. I have a couple of ideas for what to do in that area. I might mulch the area next to the water tank stand, or I might put some paver blocks there. I haven't really decided quite what I'm going to do there yet.

Well, that's it for this post, thanks for stopping by to check it out!