No surprise, it’s super tough work.

I’m not sure how, but I forgot. A backyard garden! It’s been eight (!) years since I lived in a house with my own lawn. I missed it, and was all like “Yea, I gardened before. I’ll clear these flowers, and grow some food!”. Also I did not want to spend cash for a rototiller. Why waste money on that? I never used one at home. So I cleared and tilled the land with a shovel and time. I had some leftover baby weight that I wanted to get rid of anyhow. Nothing like a spring time gardening project to get the blood pumping and get in your daily cardio. “It’ll be easier than trying to get myself to work out.” I thought.

Just to make sure I was not getting ahead of myself, I thought I’d keep it small. I decided to clear four 20 by 60 foot sections of my yard 18 inches down and one 5 by 25 foot area a foot down. Spoiler: It took me all of March, April, and May to get the job done.

Here’s an idea of what this looked like: In the morning after I put my son on the bus I went out and worked till my daughter got up (about an hour). I took care of her, did stuff around the house, and got dinner ready. In the evening after my husband came home, I went out and worked until it got too dark. I spent my time cutting out sod, loading wheelbarrows, and digging in the dirt. The cool thing was I lost 5 lbs in the first week, but I was dog tired for three months. Backyard garden! I was getting there.

About halfway through my husband realized how much I was trying to do, reminded me that I was attempting to move 7,325 cubic feet of dirt by hand, and that maybe I should reconsider. “I’ll have none of that!” I said. He said it may not be a backyard garden, but more like a small farm. “This was my garden, I am going to grow us food, and I am going to sell the extra at our farm stand.” I said. We didn’t have a farm stand then, but the one in my head was already selling our produce.

Anyhow, when we bough the house, it came with two 10 by 30 section plots in the back that were these huge unkempt flower beds. I didn’t want to lose all the flowers (they were pretty!) so I dug them up to see if I could reuse/replant them.  Iris, Bee Balm, and Black Eyed Susans, one after another, piece by piece they came out. Some were so overgrown and woven together that I had to have my husband break them into pieces and dig them out in smaller sections at a time.

Once I was done taking out the flowers and digging down, it was time to start forming the beds, with nothing but re-purposed materials and hard work. In researching what to do with my garden, I came across some articles that said that some of these flowers could help my backyard garden. It turns out that the flowers were a blessing in disguise! They can play a big part in deterring pests from finding tasty vegetables.

So I thought, “Why not use the flowers I Just dug up as the walls for the raised beds?” I did see posts that said sod walled raised beds were a thing, which looked interesting. I had all these flowers basically sitting in their own sod. Why not try it?

First, you need to understand something about me. Backyard gardens mean something different to me. I come from Michigan (which is not Detroit, which is what my friends out here think), and that comes with some gumption and stubborn. I mean, I’m from the rural part of the state, but gardens and farms in that area are very different from what I’d be doing here. So you have an idea, imagine rows as strait as an arrow, irrigation hoses covering in-between, and an endless supply of all kinds of fertilizers and insecticides. Pushing the soil season after season so it has no rest or time to regenerate. Whenever I see it, it makes me sad. “I will have a beautiful garden, full of flowers. I’ll show them what it can look like!” I said.

All the things I deiced where going to be in my backyard garden are new to me and just based in research, stubborn, and luck. New plants, companion gardening, sod walled raised beds? Whatever, I can do all of that. My husband says I never do things the easy way, so why not charge! When I was tilling and removing plants, I made sure to remove all the extra roots and Bittersweet vines I could find.

I hate Bittersweet. They’re EVERYWHERE on my property, choking out tress and getting in my way wherever I go. Their roots are bright orange when you pull them out. Every one I yanked out filled me with joy. “You won’t kill my garden! Not in my garden! Straight to the burn pile for you! Hahaha!” I thought. I may have gone a bit crazy while I was clearing them out. I may have been a little dehydrated from the sun. Don’t think about it too much. Gardening is hard.

Once everything was clear, my husband cut out a 4 by 4 piece of cardboard for me to mark out where I wanted my beds. I marked out the area, and then dug down about 10 inches to make my base. Once it was emptied, I layered cardboard at the bottom as a kind of root protection. Nothing with to much print or shiny texture to it, but we had just moved, so we had tons of cardboard boxes. The next step was to fill the bottom with 10 inches of rotting wood. What? That sounds weird! It’s actually an old gardening method, my mother-in-law told me about called Hugelkulture, and this is a variation on that.

TL:DR Hugelkulture is a German tradition of creating a raised plant bed by using decaying wood and compostable materials. It’s ideal for a backyard garden located near wooded areas. I live next to a river and a gully and I guess the people that owned the hose before me would throw all the branches and leaves down in to the gully. Jack pot! When that ran out, I started clearing away a neglected wood pile, and there was plenty. All that rotting wood was attracting mice anyhow. I filled 28 4 by 4 beds. Not too bad. I used leaves from last fall to put 6 inches of mulch on top of the wood. Then I built up the walls of my beds with my sod/flowers, and filled in with the dirt I had taken out. After fixing the gaps, I mixed in some coffee grounds and banana peels for extra flavor.

As I got down to the end I had to start getting creative with materials for the raised bed walls. I could see that my sod was not going to last all the way. So I started to rummage in over grown areas in hoped of finding something usable. What do you know, I found 2 8×1 boards that where 4 foot long. One 6 inches by 4 foot piece of PVC, and a bunch of slate pieces that must have been a path in the garden at some point. I was able to make 4 beds out of the slate pieces, and those are my favorite. It felt I had to learn masonry over night to make them fit together. After all that was said and done I was still short on materials, so I broke down and made 4 raised beds out of store bought wood. Not bad but not what I wanted. I did my best to keep the cost down, but at the end of the day, I had my garden!

I hope this inspires you to see what you have laying around and how you can use it to better your life. There is amazing stuff you can accomplish when you push yourself and put your mind to it. What could you make instead of buy today? Let me know.