Tips For A New Gardener

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Seriously...this gardening stuff is HARD!!  We spent a solid 8 weeks watering our little plants and diligently moving them into sunlight and rotating them.  A few weeks before transplanting, we began blowing a fan on the plants for periods of time to help them strengthen their roots.  And within a week of moving them outside, we transitioned them slowly to the outdoors to let them acclimate so they wouldn't go into shock when transplanted.

Do you know how difficult and time consuming it is to move something like 30 plastic cups inside and outside everyday?  We were using every cutting board and cookie sheet to move them around.  Sometimes the forecast would call for cold temps for several days in a row so we'd have to haul them all the way back to our second floor bedroom so they wouldn't be deprived of sunlight.  At one point, I actually kind of wished they would die because we were spending so much time moving them around!

Transplant day finally arrived.  According to the Google, I learned cucumber plants are climbers if they find something to grab onto.  This was good news for us since we have a small garden and cucumber plants take up a lot of space.  Of course, we didn't want to spend money on a fancy trellis so we built one out of some scraps we had laying around.  We had enough leftover chicken wire fencing from the whole "keep the rabbits out" charade - which is working beautifully by the way - to cover the front side of the trellis.  On the back, we strung some twine and crossed our fingers that would work.  I wish we would have built our trellis to sit the other direction in our garden because I honestly don't know how we are going to reach some of them at the back without stepping on the other plants.

That's one of our cucumber plants in front of the trellis.

It was almost the last week of May and we were about to leave on vacation for 5 days.  I wanted to get them in the ground so our friend could water them for us while we were away and he wouldn't have to be burdened with moving them indoors and outdoors in their little cups.  Planting went quickly...maybe less than an hour.  Unfortunately, the forecast called for more near freezing temps so we covered the entire garden with plastic.

 In the picture above, the plants in the top left and top right are all cucumbers.  bottom right are beets and bottom left are red peppers.

Unfortunately, the forecast called for more near freezing temps so we covered the entire garden with plastic.

We left on vacation and thought all was good...until our friend called and said the temps had risen...and our cucumbers got cooked.  Sure enough, when we got home, we had to pull most of them out because they were brown and shriveled.

Fortunately, soon after I went with my mom to a local nursery to get plants for our flower boxes.  As I get to the back of the nursery where they keep the vegetable plants my jaw dropped.  They had the most gorgeous, huge cucumber plants - easily 3 times the size of ours - and do you want to know how much they cost???  $.59.  Yes, that's a period in front of the 59.  Less than a dollar.  Do you have any idea how much time, energy and money we spent on supplies to grow our own plants?  Well, it was way more than $.59.  Especially because our garden is so small and we don't have an easy place to grow our plants in the house, we are definitely buying our plants from the nursery next year.  I felt so defeated for the entire day after learning how cheap they were to just purchase.  So I picked up four cucumber plants, 4 green been plants and 3 onion plants.  Total?  $7.00.  Geez.

The picture below are the beets we grew from seed indoors, they are obviously doing well.  But then I found out that each big plant only produces one beet!  That means we are using 1/4 of our garden to grow beets that will likely only feed us one meal.  Can you hear my palm hitting my forehead?  At least they're pretty to look at.

 This next one is going to hurt my ego a bit.  The plant below is the cucumber plant we bought for $.59.

 

The plant below is the one we grew, so lovingly, then cooked under a swath of plastic.

In all...the gardening experience can be described as "Good, Not Great".  Hopefully next year we can use some of these hard learned lessons to avoid a lot of headache and heartache.

Since I'm on a bloggin' roll, might as well show you the flower boxes I planted in the front yard. Here's the before pic without any fun colors.

And here's the after...which unfortunately is still mostly lacking color.  But in my defense, these were just planted so give them a few weeks and they'll start to fill out.  I'm really proud that I tried something other than impatiens this year.  Since these flower boxes only get afternoon sun, I'm stuck choosing mostly shade plants.

These are the plant varieties I chose:

Green Sweet Potato Vine

 Trailing Pansies

 Coleus

 Purple Sweet Potato Vine

So there ya have it...that's what our family has been up to.  I just started a new furniture painting project to day so hopefully I'll have some pictures of that soon - but don't hold your breath :)

Our Workshop Story

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During the summer of 2012, Brent and I were enjoying a relaxing evening on the porch with our neighbors, who also happen to be close friends of ours - literally...close.  As in, our houses are only about 10 feet apart.  They were talking about how they were planning to put a 2 car detached garage in their backyard the following summer, which is a huge asset in our neighborhood, as most homes in our part of town only have a one car garage.

Jokingly, we told them we would gladly take their existing one car detached garage off of their hands, as we could really use more storage space.  We all got a chuckle out of that, until we started thinking that maybe...possibly...it could actually be done.  At that time, our backyard had a small garden shed that was just big enough to hold our lawn mower and a few nests of rabbits under the foundation.

With Brent's carpentry skills and tool inventory increasing by the day, we knew that at some point, we were really going to need a more dedicated space to work on our projects.  The garage and the basement just weren't cutting it.  So we began dreaming about the possibilities of a real-life workshop.  With some convincing from my dad, we were assured that we could move our neighbor's one car garage from his yard right on over to our yard.  Without hesitation, we began putting plans in place to make that happen.

First, we poured a concrete foundation to set the workshop on.

Then, to prepare the garage to be moved, we removed the roof, windows and garage door.  The shingles obviously couldn't be re-used, but the wood slats that supported the roof would eventually become our soffit material.

On the day of the big move, we sweet talked a few friends into coming over to help.  The conversation went a little like this, "ahhhh...would you mind coming over Saturday morning to help us carry a building from our neighbors yard over to our yard?"  To do this, my dad apart the garage at each of the corners. 

 And we carried one wall at a time from our neighbor's yard to our new foundation.

 And stood the walls up onto bolts in the foundation.

 After less than 2 hours, the workshop was already beginning to take shape.

The rest of that first day was spent building new roof trusses...

Since this was no longer to be used as a garage, the door opening had to be much smaller...so we used some scrap material to frame up the new front face of the workshop.  By the end of the first day, we were already to the point you see below!  Little did we know how much work we still had ahead of us!
After framing in the roof, but before shingling, we decided to add a dormer using a panel of windows from the old garage door - you can see all about that process here.  Once the dormer had been installed, we began the agonizing task of shingling.

As Brent was busy framing in windows, I was attempting to salvage the exterior siding.  After scraping for a period of days and realizing I was getting no where FAST, we bit the bullet and spent about $300 to put all new siding on the shed.  No amount of paint was going to be able to make the old siding look good and boy are we glad that we re-sided the entire thing!

To prepare for the new siding, we ripped the existing siding off and framed in some additional windows.

Origianally, the garage only had two windows - one on each side.  We used the original two windows and relocated them to the front of the shop to flank the entrance doors.  As I was scouring Craigslist one day for materials, we found four additional unpainted wood windows for $20 each that just happened to match the original windows.  Adding two more windows to each side was going to majorly amp up our natural light situation.  And Brent and I had an agreement from the very beginning of this process...that if we were going to have this huge building in our backyard, it had to be adorable to look at.  Adding windows was an easy way to accomplish this.

New siding went up relatively quickly.

After the siding was installed, we used the original boards that came from the roof to build the soffits.

Craigslist windows got a coat of paint...

The siding got two coats of paint in a color called Organic Cotton, which matches our house.

We added some planting beds and mulch around the exterior to prevent mud from splashing onto the workshop when it rained - since we didn't have any gutters at this point.

After considering a lot of options, we were ultimately undecided about what to do with the front of the shed.  Stairs, a deck, a pathway...so at this point we decided that a small, inexpensive deck would work for us for a few years until we found a more permanent solution for the entrance to the shop.

I built shutters for each of the windows for less than $5 each.  Here's a simple tutorial to build them.

The double doors on the front of the workshop came from our local Habitat for Humanity REStore, for a total of only $80!

And by the time it was starting to get chilly out in the fall of 2013, we officially had a shed!  Keep in mind that at this point, it does not have electricity or heat so over the winter, we simply used the shed as cold storage.

After a long winter, spring arrived and we were motivated to continue our work on the shed.  The deck got a coat of stain...

Flower boxes were built, here's a tutorial for building them.

 Lights were installed above the front windows...

 And additional plants went in.

Whew...I'm exhausted and we've barely begun to work on the INSIDE!!  Good thing we aren't in any sort of hurry to wrap this up!

If you like this project, follow us on Facebook to see what else we're up to!

How To Build Flower Boxes

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A year ago, when Brent and I began planning our workshop, I could already visualize sweet little flower boxes on it.  Knowing there were a ton of other details that needed to come first, we put off building them...until THIS WEEKEND!  We wanted something a little different than the standard white boxes with brackets you see everywhere, so here's what we came up with.

If you want to build some for yourself, you'll need about 3 1x4's per box, which should be about $15 worth of lumber.  Brent ripped the 1x4's down into strips.

Here's an important step, I used an orbital sander to round off the edges of all the front and side pieces to create grooves.

If I hadn't rounded off the edges (Brent says this is called "breaking the edge"), the fronts and sides would look flat.

 I'm not going to provide any exact measurements because all of the dimensions can be cut to accommodate whatever width you need, depending on your window size.

After attaching the fronts and sides to the inside support pieces, Brent cut a piece to act as the bottom of the flower box.  You can use a 1x8 cut to size or a couple 1x4 pieces next to each other.

Then cut a piece to size for the back and attach to the interior supports.

I wanted to add some additional detail to give the flower boxes a more substantial feel.  The piece around the top is some 1x4 ripped into about a 1 inch width.  The bottom piece is 1x4 cut at around 2 inches wide.  That's the nice part about designing these flower boxes, you can completely customize all of the measurements and details to suit your taste.

At this stage, I sanded everything again with the orbital sander, making sure to round off all of the hard edges.  I also used a sanding block to get into the tight areas.  

Deciding how to finish them was the tricky part.  I always assumed I would paint them white to match the flower boxes on the front of our house, but after seeing this picture on Pinterest, I definitely wanted to stain them!  I applied two coats of American Walnut stain (one didn't get them as dark as I wanted) and three coats of spar varnish.

I even brushed three coats of spar varnish on the insides of the flower boxes to protect the wood from all of the moisture.

Lucky for me, I got to get up at 7:15 on Mother's Day morning to start applying the coats of varnish!  The coats dry really quickly, so by noon, they were all done and ready for flowers.  We lined the boxes with landscape fabric to prevent dirt from seeping out the fronts and sides.

 To hang them on the workshop, we bought these galvanized L brackets.  Make sure you don't buy brackets made of zinc or they will rust out.

I'm so happy that we went with the stained flower boxes - I think the color of the boxes ties the mulch color (looks like we need to add more mulch!) and roof color all together.  

 The kids and I also had time to put down new mulch in the front gardens and plant the flower boxes under the two large windows.  Emma, Owen and I essentially spent the entire weekend digging in the dirt - which made for a PERFECT Mother's Day weekend!