Fruit and Vegetable Boxes

When we first moved into our house there were so many important things that needed to get done that a lot of the “fun” things had to be put on the back burner, but every once and a while you have to take a break from the big projects like fencing and do something that makes you excited.  A week or two before Oakley was born, Andrew and I went and bought some wood from Lowes to make a vegetable box for our garden.  We had everything measured out and then, of course, changed our plan ten times while we were in there.  We finally decided what we were going to do, bought the wood, and pushed it out to his truck.  It wasn’t long until we realized that the wood was way longer than his truck bed.  We did not have any bright, orange flags to hang off of the bed or a trailer to load it on, but we just purchased all of this wood and we were so excited to finally build something that was exciting!  Needless to say, we hauled that wood with half of it hanging off the back of Andrew’s truck bed 30 miles home.  Yes, you read that right.  We live 30 miles away from Lowes.

The whole way home we were both completely silent because we were so nervous we were going to get pulled over.  We literally sat in silence the whole way home and I’m pretty sure the radio wasn’t even on.  Andrew drove about 50 MPH in the slow lane the entire way back.  About two miles from our exit, a state trooper got behind us and we were both waiting for him to flash his blue lights and turn on his sirens. So, Andrew drove as fast as he could and we tried to outrun him! I’m just kidding!  Did I scare you?  That state trooper stayed behind us until we got off on our exit.  We made it all the way home with our 16-foot boards hanging off the back of Andrew’s truck!

I tried to help Andrew build the vegetable box as much as I could but my feet were so swollen and it was pretty hot.  It was hard being pregnant, moving into a new house, and not being able to do much, especially while being off of work all summer.  I’m sure it was hard on Andrew too since he had to do a lot of stuff on his own. That day, we built our first vegetable box even though we knew we wouldn’t be able to plant anything in it until Spring.  We didn’t care though because it felt like we were making progress and it was something to look forward to.

Fast forward five months and Andrew spent Sunday building more fruit and vegetable boxes.  Now we have one large box, a medium one, and four small boxes.  We plan on planting a lot of vegetables and fruit like carrots, broccoli, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers.  We think we’ll use one of the small beds for berries and another small bed for herbs!  We don’t know much about gardening so I’m going to consider any fruit or vegetables that we can eat a success.  I also want to plat a cut flower garden because I think it will be nice to have fresh flowers in my house and I think I’ll enjoy putting together different bouquets.  What I’m most excited for is to make Oakley baby food from the fruits and vegetables that we grow!

By the way, this is exciting! To start off our garden, I won seeds from the blog, A Life in the Buff!  They have their own seeds that they save every year and sent me a bunch of different types of tomatoes and peppers I’ve never even heard of.  They also threw in a bunch of extra seeds like beans and herbs too!  This week we’re working on getting our vegetable and fruit boxes filled with soil and doing some research on where we want to buy our other seeds.  I can’t wait to share more pictures as things start growing in our garden!