428. 5 Lessons I Learned Building a Kitchen Garden For My Mom this Spring •

The Hempstead Home Depot Garden Center Team

Lesson #1: Measure First. My original plans for my mom’s bed was to build it 8’x4’ using four two-by-sixes cut in half and eight full-size. Before the associate at Home Depot made the first cut, I wondered how I'd fit an 8-foot board in my mom’s car. So, we ended up taking a couple of 2’x 6’x 12’ boards and cutting them into two 6-foot chunks and four 3-foot chunks each. But even this was too big in the end for the space I had picked out. A 5’x 2’ bed would have been best for her particular spot. If it were my house, I’d move the flowers and bushes to make room for the bigger bed, not the other way around. However, my mom hadn’t tasted the homegrown veggies we were going to grow yet. She was still not entirely sold on the value of a deep bed or growing your own, as she thought the farmers' market was convenient enough. [caption id="attachment_140350" align="aligncenter" width="768"] In this photo you can see how my brother drilled a couple of boards for extra support to sit on top of.[/caption] #2: Level ~ level ~ level I ended up pulling this bed apart and putting it back together, not one, not two, not three, but four times before I could plant it, because I didn’t take the time to level the bed properly in the first place. #3: Obtaining soil I can’t tell you how many people I have talked to about the first step to building a garden starts way before you are ready to plant, but with saving scraps and building a compost bin to create your own healthy soil. Deciding where to locate your soil and planning for extra soil when needed is essential. Someone had told me I could get soil at the local dump, but when I headed over with my garbage can, shovel, and some pots,...