Garden Project Day 3 - Construction nearly completed!

With the work that was completed in the last few days, Darrin took a few minutes to sit down with the "plans" to figure out what we needed to do next.

Today's mission, get the rest of the boxes completed so that we can play tomorrow! It could be a long night!

Actually, not too bad though. Since everything was cut and all holes were drilled it was just a matter of putting everything together. It was fast work to get the boxes put together and the bottoms put on.

We did make a few modifications to the original plans as we worked through the project. We were not going to put bottoms on the boxes. However, in the end, all of the boxes were getting bottoms - just in case we decide that we need to move the garden or something goofy like that!

One of the final steps in the building process was to get the grid bars put on. Each box will be divided into 1x1 squares for planting. So that means in each large box, there will be 8 boxes for planting in and the small one will have 4. The biggest challenge in this step was to actually get the grids attached to the boxes so that they were even. Can't have one square bigger than another! LOL

Once the grids were in place, the final step is to drill drainage holes in the bottoms of the boxes and we are done! We will get those in first thing tomorrow and my garden will be ready to put into place and plant!

Dear Menards, Can I please have 2+ hours of my life back?!

On Thursday, as we were getting in the car to head up north, John told me that part of my Birthday present was on the seat of the car. Now keep in mind that my birthday is still about 3 weeks away. So of course I was curious...

It was the newest edition of the "Square Foot Gardening" book. I have been talking about wanting to plant a garden for a few years but with all the deer around here all the time, we were hesitant. The neighbors tried a few years back (before I moved into the neighborhood) to have a garden, but gave up because they just ended up feeding the deer, rabbits, squirrels and whatever other 4 legged plant eating varmints that happened to be within smelling distance of the house. And this was all with a fence around it!!

After seeing the success that my uncle has had with his garden over the last year, keeping in mind that he had a deer feeder not even 30 yards from his fenced in garden, I wanted to try. John remembered his mom watching this guy's show on TV as he was growing up about Square Foot Gardening... and come to find out, he had a new book out!

So for my birthday this year, I was getting a garden! We spent the weekend going through the book, reading up on the "directions" for a proper square foot garden... grow everything in 1/3 the space of a traditional "row" garden. Sounds good to me! I figured out who big I wanted my garden, leaving the option to "grow" in the future if the need or desire arises. An 8x8 ft garden sounded like it would give us what we wanted in the space we wanted to use.

Tonight we spent 2+ hours at Menards and Steins picking up part of what we needed. I am convinced that Menards has some weird force-field or something that automatically takes away 2+ hours of your life just by walking in the door. We were at Menards from 3:45 until just after 6pm! I know that we left Menards to go to Steins for a bit (basically right across the street), but we were only there long enough to find out that they didn't have much of what we needed for the "magic" mix that we needed for the garden. (apparently only a few places in town carry Vermiculite, and everyone was out of stock so we had to order it) So we went to Menards to but most of what we needed. It was not until I got back into my car that I realized it was after 6pm! Granted there was the time spent looking for my lost keys at Menards, but that's a whole different story!

There was still a few more "ingredients" that we would need, but we at least had everything we needed to build the boxes. We called Darrin on the way home and told asked him to throw a frozen pizza in the oven since neither of us felt like making dinner!

Starting on the construction part tonight was a thought, but that was as far as it got! Guess we start tomorrow instead!

Campfire Birthday Cake

Today for John's Birthday, Darrin and I decided to make him this really cool Campfire Cake! Now I actually got the idea from another craft blog. Amazing what you can do with a boxed chocolate cake, a can of frosting and some candy!

The filling on the cake is caramel too! This was the first time that I actually made caramel by boiling Sweetened Condensed Milk! I think I cooked mine a bit too long as it was REALLY thick when I was putting the cake together. The joys of having a high powered microwave - things cook a lot faster than usually called for! But it all came together in the end!

The logs are actually cappucino chocolate filled wafer cookies! (gotta love the Dollar Tree!!) and then the flames (which make the cake awesome!) are actually made from Cinnamon hard candies and Butterscotch candies, crushed and then melted in the oven. My candies were a bit thick and hard to break, but they all came apart with a little work!

Overall, this cake was not that hard to make, just a little time consuming between boiling the caramel, melting the candies and allowing ample cooling time!

Now that John is done taking pictures of it, it is time to eat cake!!