Cinderblock Garden: Assembly and Planting

Hi, friends! If you're reading this post and would like to see an update from my Summer 2013 garden, click here!

Also, learn about this project in the planning stages in this post.

Once I planned my garden and gathered my materials things started moving quickly!

Assembling the Garden

One of the great things about gardening in raised beds is the lack of weeding, tilling, and soil testing typically necessary before getting started. The hardest part of constructing this garden was lugging all the materials from the car to the back yard, and Michael did most of that.

Since I wanted a 4'x16' space on the middle I used 32 cinder blocks and arranged them like so:

These blocks are heavier than they look! We started by just laying them out in what looked like a perfect rectangle, but our lines were way too far apart at the end. I would recommend using a tape measure as a guide while you lay out your blocks because adjusting them after you've placed them is quite a workout for the back.

With the blocks in place, I laid newspaper in the center to prevent grass from growing up through the dirt. I wish I had made this layer a bit thicker than the 2-3 pages I used since I've found a few blades of grass poking up two weeks later.

Then, we filled the bed with a mixture of topsoil, peat moss, and cow manure. I found a fantastic website with a calculator to determine how much of each component I needed to fill my bed. Unfortunately I lost the link, but the basic guideline is to use 60% topsoil, 30% compost or manure, and 10% peat moss or vermiculite.

I didn't fill up the cinderblocks until a few days after I'd planted the veggies since I was waiting for my herb seeds to come in the mail and I was running low on dirt ingredients. I actually used potting soil for this rather than buying extra dirt mix. This cost me some extra money, but saved me an extra trip to Lowes.

Overall, this project took about a week since I could only bring the materials home one carload at a time. If we'd had a truck we probably could have finished it in an afternoon.

Planting

Most people who use square foot gardening techniques use some type of grid to mark off the squares. When I was using my old kiddie pool garden Michael used fishing line to make a grid for me. But my new cinderblocks are too hard to easily affix anything to the sides. For that reason, we just used a tape measure to figure out the boundaries of our squares while planting. Now that my seeds are in the ground, I can't tell the exact perimeter of the squares, but I did mark the end of each row with a large popsicle stick displaying the name of its contents.

These came from the craft store

 

They've faded a bit, but they were dirt cheap!

In my last post I talked about planning which veggies to plant in each square. With my plan in front of me and Michael helping me line everything up, planting the seeds was a breeze. Even though the spacing information won't be consistent with SFG, be sure to check the seed packs for planting depth.

With my veggies planted in the center of the bed, I put herb and flower seeds in the holes of the cinderblocks. I still can't believe what a great deal I got on my assortment of herb seeds from Amazon!

Once my seeds were in the ground, I watered them well and waited for them to sprout.

Here's the grand tally of what I've planted
Veggies:
Heirloom Brandywine tomatoes: 2
Roma tomatoes : 4
Winter squash (variety pack): 4
Yellow squash: 7
Zucchini: 1
Roma bush beans (snap beans): 72
Collard greens: 16
Spinach: 36 (more to come)
Carrots: 48 (more to come)

Herbs:
Basil
Italian parsley
Cilantro
Mint
Thyme
Sage
Dill
Rosemary
Chives
Garlic chives
Savory
Marjoram
Oregano
Mustard

Flowers: 
Nasturtiums - not the right time to plant, but I had the seeds so I decided to try them and replace them with marigolds if they don't work

Two and a half weeks later, here it is!

Baby beans

As you can see, the beans sprouted quickly. I've already planted my third and fourth rows of beans, so soon I'll have even more little green shoots.

Yellow squash and zucchini

Winter squash

The squash is growing fast, too. One of my zucchini and two of my winter squash didn't sprout, but that's alright - I've planted new seeds that won't be far behind the others.

Tiny tomato

All six of my tomato plants sprouted! Tomatoes are the prize of most gardens, even if they take a long time to grow and require special care. Since I'm getting started late in the season for tomatoes I was excited that they all came up on the first try!


I'm still waiting to see any growth from my collards, spinach, carrots, and herbs. These are typically slower starting crops that do well in cooler weather, so I'm not in a hurry to see them grow. I've got a few tiny sprouts from my basil and sage, but the perimeter of my garden is looking pretty sparse. Hopefully it'll fill out soon.

So, that's it! I'll be sure to give some updates as the season progresses!

Cinderblock Garden: Planning

Hi, friends! If you're reading this post and would like to see an update from my Summer 2013 garden, click here!

Also, to read about the assembly and planting stages of this project, check out this post.

Folks who knew me in Augusta are probably familiar with my kiddie pool garden. This makeshift veggie patch was wonderful for our old rental house. It left minimal damage to the yard, required only a smallish financial investment, and was low maintenance. But when we started dreaming about our new home I was ready to leave the kiddie pool behind.

The kiddie pool at its prime

I pictured rows and rows of produce plentiful enough to fill our plates in summer and fall. But all of the houses we looked at in the Memphis area had modest yards, and the house we fell in love with has one of the smallest! I know now that this is a good thing considering Michael's schedule, which will sometimes require him to choose between mowing and sleep. But it has caused me to rethink my dream garden. Here are a few things to consider when planning your own veggie patch.


Type of Garden

The kiddie pool was simply a raised bed that I planted using the square foot gardening method, only the "squares" along the edge were oddly shaped. Since I knew I could get a lot of produce out of a small space using this method (100 tomatoes last year from four squares!), I decided to stick with it for my new raised bed.

Measuring squares for the old kiddie pool

I was researching how to build raised beds from wood when I found this post that mentioned cinder block gardens. Perfect! I could easily assemble it without Michael's help (although he did help), I could save valuable square footage by planting herbs along the outside of the bed, and I could fit cinder blocks in my little Honda much better than long planks of wood.

**Note: I considered using wood pallets to build beds, but there are a lot of articles floating around the internet about the risks of using wood of unknown origin, especially chemically treated, to grow veggies. I might try them for flower beds, though.

I wound up needing much more dirt than this!

Materials and Cost

The week of garden construction, I went to Lowes every day after work and got my trunk loaded to capacity with cinder blocks, peat moss, topsoil, and cow manure. I already had most of my veggie seeds leftover from last year, but bought a few extras and ordered my herb seeds from Amazon. By using cinder blocks instead of pricy wood and using seeds instead of plants, I feel like this is shaping up to be a very cost effective garden. I could have saved a little more if I'd bought more topsoil and cow manure for the dirt mixture. I didn't have enough to fill the cinder block holes so I used potting soil, which is more expensive. Keep in mind that the biggest cost is dirt, so the larger your bed, the more expensive it will be. My 16'x4'x8" bed required almost a ton of dirt!!


Here's the cost breakdown:
32 cinder blocks (8x8x16) x $1.20 ea = $38.40
35 bags topsoil (1 cu ft) x $1.25 ea = $43.75
2 cubes (3 cu ft) peat moss x $9.74 = $19.48 - discount for damaged bag = $14.94
6 bags (50 lb) cow manure x $4.77 = $28.62
3 bags (32 quart) potting soil x  $6.88 = $20.64
Newspaper - free (gathered free local publications at Kroger)
Seeds - mostly leftover from last year; herbs were free w/ Amazon rewards points
Total Cost: $146.35 - including leftover seeds and potting soil

Topsoil is cheap, but requires additional nutrients

I got a big discount thanks to the hole in the bag!

Considering I probably spend at least $25/year on herbs alone I think I'll easily recoup my investment over the next several years.

Planting Time

You may be thinking I'm crazy to plant a garden in the extreme heat of early August, but this helpful website confirmed that its the right time to plant seeds for a fall harvest in Memphis. I'll water the garden daily with a sprinkler until the heat calms down a bit.

If you want to be fancy you can start your seeds indoors and transplant to the garden later, but our cat loves to chew on plants, so that's out of the question for us. I also think it's a lot simpler to sow seeds directly. They're easier to water that way and if something doesn't sprout I can always plant another seed or buy a plant later.

Depending on what types of veggies you choose you may want to sow some of your seeds a few weeks apart for a continual harvest. For instance, I planted only half of my carrots, spinach, and beans and will plant more in a few weeks. Also, consider that some plants, like bush beans, have a short harvest time, which may allow you to plant something else in those spots when they finish. I plan to plant more spinach once my bean squares are empty.

Plant Selection and Placement

One of the most important parts of planning is to think about the types of veggies you like to eat and how many plants you'll need to produce a good yield. I've learned that I have to grow a ton of bean plants in order to eat more than five beans at a time, but one cherry tomato plant will produce more than we can hope to eat before they spoil.

Once I selected my veggies and decided roughly how many I wanted, I planned where they would go. The easiest way for me to do this is to draw a diagram of the garden and divide it into one-foot squares. If you're looking for something a little more tech-savvy http://www.smartgardener.com/ and http://www.vegetable-gardening-online.com have very cool drag-and-drop garden planners with guides for how many seeds to plant per square. Something important to remember is that the tallest plants in your garden should go to the north so they don't shade other plants too much. I planned my plants tall to short.

Planning was the hardest and most important part of the process. I'll post again soon with details about setting up and planting my cinder block garden. Thanks for reading!

Scripture Wall Art From Pallets

I love the idea of displaying scripture prominently throughout the home. So one of my goals for our new house is to incorporate God's Word somehow in each room.

This passage from Deuteronomy has become a personal challenge for me to value scripture as a central part of my life, not just inwardly, but outwardly as well:

⁶ And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. ⁷  You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. ⁸  You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. ⁹  You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
Deuteronomy 6:6-9 

 Moving into a new house prompted me to search the home decor boards on Pinterest with compulsive intensity. One of my favorite ideas by far was this one, a sign made from found industrial pallets. I loved it. I had to have it. But where in the world would I find a pallet?

To my surprise, within a week of moving to Southaven, MS I acquired five wooden pallets! The first two were propped next to a dumpster at the storage facility we went to for a Craigslist purchase. The others were rescued from construction dumpsters at several of the new lots in our neighborhood. It was a great way to identify ourselves as weird neighbors right off the bat. : )

The pallet that would become art

As it turns out, pallets are nasty boogers to take apart. I'd imagined myself tearing them apart, but when it came down to it I couldn't even carry the stupid things! It turned into what we call a "boy job" in the Vaughan household. We had another project in mind (more on that later), so Michael decided to take apart several pallets at once. He started out using the claw end of a hammer, but found that it was hard to get the planks to budge, and when they did, they typically broke. No good. But he discovered that a thin crow bar did the trick really well. Even so, it was really hard and tedious work.

What a handy husband!

Pallets: more fragile than they look

Beware of rusty nails!

Once the pallets were taken apart I painted the pieces with gray paint I found for cheap on the mess-up rack at Lowes. Score!! Unless you're planning to distress your wood like they did in my inspiration photo it's important to get paint in all the nooks and crannies of your planks.

This is where the tricky part came in. Lots of the tutorials I've seen for similar projects involve fancy cutting machines like Cricuts, which I don't have. The tutorial that went with my inspiration photo said to cut the words out of printer paper by hand, paint over them, and peel them off. I tried cutting out words for about a minute and the results were pretty pathetic! That lady must have super crafting powers!

I was getting desperate for a solution when I found this tutorial for tracing words on wood signs using carbon paper. Perfect! This method probably works much better on a smooth surface, but it worked fine on my gnarly wood. Things started moving quickly at this point:

1. I printed my words. I used the same font as my inspiration tutorial - Rage Italic, and I think I used size 120? It was big. I printed the words in gray so I'd be able to see where I'd traced over them. I also printed each line at the top of a page and spaced words far apart so that it would be easier to line them up evenly.

2. I cut off the excess paper beneath the words and arranged them on the planks. Be sure to divide phrases so that they make sense and look evenly spaced. Some lines will be spaced farther apart than others. Having each of the words equidistant from the top of the page made it easy to keep them straight. Once I was happy with the arrangement I used blue painter's tape to keep it in place.

3. I slid a piece of carbon paper under the printer paper and used a ballpoint pen to trace over the words. In some cases just outlining the word was sufficient, but in other cases, especially on rough patches of wood, it was necessary to fill them in entirely. The carbon paper leaves a faint black imprint anywhere you press sharply on it. I was concerned that the weight of my hand would leave black blotches underneath, but it didn't.

I got mine from Office Depot

 

Turn the carbon paper black-side-down

Very faint outline - but enough to do the trick

4. Once the words were all traced I used a small paintbrush to paint in the letters. I used the cream colored paint the builders used for trim throughout our house. My friend Amelia came over to help me out with this, but I forgot to take pictures of her. Instead I just have pictures of wood and paint. : /

I used the traced outlines and the printed words as guides

5. After the paint was dry Michael helped me line up the planks on the backing pieces and nailed them down. I dabbed a little gray paint over each of the nails so they weren't shiny anymore and we were done!

Ta-da!

In its new home by the fireplace

I absolutely love it! I love the size, the colors, and the perfect amount of imperfection. But most of all I love having such a prominent reminder of the richness of God's love to us in the form of adoption through Jesus. Let me know if you have creative ideas for displaying more scripture in other parts of my home.

Thanks for stopping by! Be on the lookout for more successful Pinterest projects in the next few weeks!

Back to Blogging: A Quick Recap

It's been a while since January.

Time has flown by so fast over the past six months that my blog hasn't been able to keep up! So I'm dedicating this post to commemorate one of the busiest, hardest, and most exciting chapters of my life.

Here it is in pictures:

Surprise from my sweet Valentine

Michael ran the Augusta Half Marathon with church buddies

Batman and Robin at Match Day festivities

2nd Annual Vaughan-Baareman Garage Sale

Offer accepted on the new house!

Lake weekend with college friends

Laura's baby shower

Saying goodbye to my fantastic coworkers at Doctors

MCG School of Medicine - Class of 2012

Dr. and Mrs. Vaughan

Good times with family - including Michael's parents

Parting with dear friends, (Dr.) Jason and Laura

Going away party with our Berea church family

Goodbye to the Trollingers, our beloved home group hosts

  

Moving day - packing up for Southaven, MS

Lucy Baareman was born! Skype only for now.

First day as Dr. Vaughan!

With others from Christ Community Health Services

 Lots of other great things have happened for us, like finding a great church, starting my new job, getting settled in our home, and meeting our neighbors. But more on most of that later...

Ten Chapter Challenge

Two weeks ago I mentioned in this post that I was planning to start Grant Horner's ten-chapter-per-day Bible reading plan. When I first heard about the plan I was seriously intimidated. But the more I thought about it, the more I decided it was just what I needed. Lately my attempts at consistent scripture reading have been plagued by these problems: a lack of direction (reading a little here and a little there), getting bogged down in more difficult sections, and looking for deep meaning in just a few verses but coming away scratching my head. This plan has an answer for each of these problems: a structure and prescribed reading amount for each day, a mixture of stories, instruction, and poetry/prophecy each day, and the expectation (already confirmed) that scripture will explain scripture. In other words, the more I read the more I understand, without diagramming each sentence or cross-referencing all kinds of verses I can't remember. The cross-referencing happens on its own.

I'm happy to say that by God's grace I just completed Day 15 of the plan. I've read 150 chapters of the Bible in the past two weeks!! That's ridiculous! And I absolutely love it! Reading on my phone (I highly recommend the ESV Bible App) means that I can read a little when I wake up, a little while I eat breakfast, a little in a work break, a little after dinner, and a little before bed. Or all together. I was skeptical that quick reading (not trying to absorb every detail) would allow me to finish in 45 minutes, but I think it usually takes me less than that.

I absolutely love how much of God's word I've been exposed to in this time. And I think the thing that really pushes me forward is seeing how much ground I've covered so quickly. So here's a look at what I've read in just a short time.

Matthew
Jesus is born, baptized, tempted, calls disciples, gives the Sermon on the Mount, heals a LOT of people, calms a storm, sends out the apostles, teaches in parables, feeds a LOT of people, walks on water.

Genesis
God creates the world, Adam and Eve sin, Cain kills Abel, Noah builds an ark, God sends the flood, God disperses the peoples from the Tower of Babel, God calls Abram, God gives Abram land, God makes a covenant with Abram.

Romans
God's wrath against sin is righteous. We are justified by faith. We are free from sin and slaves to righteousness. The law reveals sin, and sin takes advantage of the law. We live according to the Spirit, not the flesh. We are sons of God. Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. God shows wrath to some and mercy to others. Faith comes through hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ. God will save the remnant of Israel and the Gentiles who are grafted in to his kingdom. We are to live sacrificially through love, service, rejoicing, prayer, humility, and peace. We should submit to earthly authorities. We shouldn't judge each other or cause each other to stumble.

1 Thessalonians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy
God has not called us for impurity, but holiness. Jesus will return and take the saints with him. No one knows when Jesus will come back. Avoid idleness. Avoid false teachers. Christ came to save sinners. Prayer pleases God. Elders and deacons must meet requirements. The church is responsible to care for widows.

Job
Job is righteous and God allows Satan to take all he has to test him. Job suffers greatly, but does not curse God even though his friends think he has sinned to earn his hardships.

Psalms
God establishes/protects/hears the righteous and punishes/judges the wicked. God will send his Son. God's love is steadfast. Those who trust/fear God rejoice/give thanks. God's creation shows us his majesty. God does great things for us. God takes care of the poor.

Proverbs
Wisdom is one of God's greatest gifts. The way of sin leads to destruction. Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Honor God with the firstfruits of your labor. Love reproof - it's good for you. Do not withhold good when it's in your power to give. Adultery leads to death. Be responsible with your money and work hard for it. God hates a liar. Righteousness is a better reward than riches. A wife can bring glory or shame to her husband. Words are powerful. Good parents are diligent in discipline. Blessed is he who gives to the poor. God sees everything and everyone. Seeking good advice leads to success.

Joshua
God leads Joshua to the promised land. Rahab hides the spies of Israel. God allows the nation of Israel to cross the Jordan on foot. Israel worships God, circumcises the new generation, and observes passover. Israel defeats Jericho, Ai, the Gibeonites, the Amorites, and lots of other people in Canaan. Land is distributed as inheritances for the tribes of Israel.


Isaiah
God will judge the wickedness of his people and destroy the earth. God will blot out their sins. God is weary of our religious rituals. God will humble his people. The remnant of Israel will be glorified. Isaiah has a vision of the Lord and he purifies his mouth and takes away his guilt. The son of God will be descended from David and will be called Immanuel, Wonderful Counselor, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. God will destroy Babylon.

Acts
Jesus commissions the apostles and ascends into heaven. Matthias replaces Judas. The Holy Spirit comes at Pentecost. The members of the church take care of each other in every way. Peter and John preach and heal people and are arrested, but released after giving witness. Ananias and Sapphira are struck dead after being dishonest about offerings to the church. Stephen is arrested, gives witness, and is stoned. Simon the magician tries to gain the power of the Holy Spirit for monetary gain, but is converted. Philip converts an Ethiopian eunuch. Saul, who persecuted the church, encounters Jesus and is converted to Paul, the missionary. God shows to Peter in a dream that no people or things are unclean. Peter preaches to the Gentiles and they receive the Holy Spirit. James is killed. Peter is imprisoned and later rescued by an angel. Barnabus and Saul go to Cyprus, Antioch, Iconium, and Lystra.


It's been a good two weeks, wouldn't you say?! Try it for yourself!