Box #2 built and planted!

Last week it took me four days to put together a simple 4x4 container box for a veggie garden. Today I built another one in ten minutes. Today's box was made of 1" pine instead of 2" Douglas fir and that makes all the difference. I don't think the plants will give a tinker's damn what they are set into, but for me, the difference is enormous.

I keep remembering that I'm a heart patient. The chemotherapy that failed, the one that made me bald and did absolutely nothing to zap the cancer, that's the one that wrecked my heart. I take a ton of pills to offset the damage. I'm reminded that I live on the edge of congestive heart failure every time I eat a restaurant meal full the the sodium I avoid at home. The gurgling starts in my throat and then it's hard to breathe. All of which means that I can get these boxes screwed together but I take a break every five minutes. Seriously.

Last fall some laborers cut down all the blackberry bushes in our back yard and cleared out the debris. When I looked the area over this spring I felt very, very sad, certain that we would never see another blackberry in our yard. Well! Blackberries are just about the most invasive crop in Sonoma County and the fence line is loaded with sprouts growing very fast.

I want the blackberries, I just want some control over them. Left to themselves they will shoot six feet from the fence and make a garden area smaller than a postage stamp. This morning I set a few stray bricks about two feet from the fence to give me a visual idea as to how I want to limit these things. Anything beyond two feet got clipped, the ones within the boundary got trained up string stapled to the fence.

I broke my ankle once trying to reach across a ditch to the one perfect blackberry. I love blackberries. I want them to grow in my back yard but I only want two feet of them. They can extend a hundred feet around all the fencing back there, but only two feet out. So I now have that crop growing nicely too.

I don't have any photos to show you but trust me, I did plant the box. So now I have 32 square feet of container garden plus lots of blackberries. After I tidy things a bit I'll show you the pictures.

I started a sketch too but didn't finish. Everything waits until tomorrow....