Lord Solar

Three months after putting in the garden and planting the first batch of vegetables we need more room. We are eating lettuce and bok choy almost every day now, the broccoli is on its way too. The red lettuce and bok choy is growing like crazy. We attempted to stick to the Square Foot Gardening method, but somehow eye balling the spaces didn’t work. Luckily there was room to expand.

Fortunately the expansion was fairly straight forward. Dig a hole on one side of the existing garden bed and move the pavers. The hole digging proved a little more difficult than last time as the ground was a little less wet. After 45 minutes of digging, this time I just spread the dirt out over the winter grass, I was ready to edge in the pavers. Luckily I had a heavy duty delivery vehicle at my disposal. I strongly recommend at least this type of vehicle before attempting a gardening project.

This went much quicker as I had purchased more pavers the day before with two bags of sand. Using the sand for leveling the pavers went in in about 20 minutes. The old paved edge served as a string guide, I simply continued the line down to the curved brick edging around the grass. On the grass side are heavy stackable pavers usually used in retention. On the far brick side are thin cover pavers placed upright against the brick edging on a thin outcrop of dirt. There was no need to cut anything this time, the old curved edge fit well in the new location.

Once the pavers were in, it was a matter of placing the weed guard down into the pit and filling it with the purchased bags of dirt. A simple task that should have taken 10 minutes, was delayed 24 hours by a busted irrigation pipe. When digging the original hole, I accidentally cracked a white PVC sprinkler pipe. The crack was minor enough to require only copious amounts of epoxy, seriously that stuff will fix anything. Have it just in case.

After letting the epoxy dry for 24 hours…

The next day after work, I stopped by the back yard, tested the irrigation line, no leak. It took 12 minutes to put the liner in and dump 6 bags of garden soil into the hole. We had tomatoes, cucumbers, and squash all moved over in an hour.

The price tag for this expanded green real estate was an additional $130. Again the pavers were the most expensive part. You can go less fancy with wood or plastic edging and get away with it for maybe $40. We’re now waiting for the spring to start a larger planting of tomatoes and a few other plants. By Summers end the garden will probably curve around half the yard.

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