You can make these square gardening beds yourself but I bought them on sale at Ace Hardware for $28 plus I had a $5 off coupon from the back of a grocery receipt. I’m going to start with two (in addition to two from last year) and then add two more someday. You can use them separately or build them into a rectangle as shown here.
First, I took a shovel and scraped up the grass. That is the second hardest part and there’s no way I would’ve finished it in one afternoon if I didn’t want to post the “before” and “after” pictures on the blog, so thank you blog readers! [I started tearing up all of the grass I removed and adding it to our compost bin then, to make matters even harder on myself, decided to start putting some of the good grass into places in our yard lacking grass, which meant prepping those areas and fitting the sod into its new location.]
Next, put at least one or two bags of garden soil on top of the dirt. It would be great to add some compost if you have it. Now for the hardest part, you turn over shovelfuls of the existing earth, remove all of the rocks and roots, and mix in the new, good dirt and compost. Mix the clay with the good dirt as much as possible. Sometimes if the clay is rock hard, I just throw it aside and use it to fill woodchuck holes — it’s entertaining for them to dig it all back out.
Once that’s all nice and level and mixed in, add another 2-3 bags of good dirt over the top and level. Now you can plant your seeds or plants. Today I just put in carrot seeds because it was starting to rain.
