Building a Raised Garden

Physical labor is REALLY laborious in the tropics. There's never a cool season for doing garden work... There's never a cool time of day...

I had to just suck it up and do as much as I could when I could. I've accepted that everything takes me a long, long time, but eventually it all gets done. 

Here's a progressive photo of the new raised garden bed.

(Sorry for the small size. The scale was a blogspot limitation. You can zoom the page if you really need to see more.)

If you care about the actual scale, the straight walls are each 12 feet long and it's about 18 inches deep. The total area is ~110 sq feet.

The soil you see there now is native garden soil and prone to root knot nematodes. I've planted mustard to "kill" the nematodes. When it matures, I'll till the mustard into the soil, fill it to the top with bagged, sterile soil, and plant my new garden. I'll alternate garden/mustard/garden/mustard for the rest of my life.

I actually kept track of all the hauling I did from the driveway -- down several sets of stairs -- to this garden at the far, lower end of the yard. 1000 pounds of soil ... 1500 pounds of stacking stones ... 350 pounds of post piers. The straight walls are reclaimed Trex from the previous owner's playground.

Whew!