Final Day of Construction.... tomorrow we plant!

The final day of construction is here!

Once the boxes are built and in place, it will be time to blend together the "magic mix" that was recommended in the "Square foot Gardening" book. No dirt involved. The boxes are filled with a blend that consists of equal parts compost, peat moss and vermiculite. No fertilization needed. The vermiculite was pretty hard to find. On Tuesday afternoon, we started making calls to find it. Most places that carried it, were either out of stock or only had small bags, of which we would have had to by way too many, making it really expensive! Finally, when we called Green Bay nursery, they said they did not have any in, but they could order it and it would be here before the weekend.

So that was the first part of the project for tonight was heading to pick up the vermiculite and check out what else they had at GB Nursery. Aside from the vermiculite, the only thing that we needed was a few more bags of compost. It was recommended that you do not buy all of the same type of compost... but at least 4-5 different kinds. So we pound a few more bags here! Shopping complete!

A quick drilling of the drainage holes in the bottom when we got home, we were ready to go. Time to figure out exactly where we were going to put everything. Better decide that before we fill all the boxes!

We figured that Darrin would have been all over helping us combine the mix for the garden, but not tonight. Oh well, more fun for us! LOL

We quickly decided that there was no way that our tarp was big enough to mix everything all at one. So we opted to do half at a time. This was the easiest way to divide it up as we had even numbers of bags to work with.

What a mess! It became evident why they recommended spraying a light mist of water over the mix once you have everything poured onto the tarp - it is very dusty!

With everything mixed together, it was time to fill the boxes. Funny thing, even though we checked and double checked out math to figure out how much of everything we would need for the mix we ended up with A LOT of extra. Granted, we knew that we were going to have a little leftover, but we only needed about 2/3 of what we mixed! Works for me - now I have some of the mix that I can up in my potted plants!!!