One Giant Garden Box…and a Plan!

We love our new house. We’re not so in L.O.V.E. with our front yard. We’re outside people. We like to DIY, build stuff and get our hands dirty. But our tiny little house in downtown Charleston has very little outside space. It was a trade off we were willing to accept for the location and an issue we hoped we could address with some strategic planning.

We have BIG plans for the front of our house. A formal Charleston piazza will be added onto the front come next summer, along with the possibility of a garage door being added to the unfinished basement. We’ll be removing the current eyesore of a staircase and turning the leftover space into a proper front yard, complete with BBQ, play space for the girls and a front garden. There’s even talks about a white picket fence 🙂

Until then, however…we need to do some temporary upgrades, which is how this hot little number came to be. A giant front yard garden box, complete with edibles and flowers {and edible flowers}.

We had to remove a large chunk of bushes from this side of the yard {and by we, I mean my boyfriend…because I was 9 months pregnant when this project began}. You can see the before and after of that project above. Unfortunately, I didn’t keep very good track of this projects progress, but you get the idea.

To build the box, we used 2x10s and 2 1/2″ wood screws to build a 10′ x 2′ x 20″ box. The box is bottomless, so we just added landscape fabric to the bottom using a staple gun. Then we hauled home 20 bags of garden soil. There’s certainly easier ways to do this, but the day we went to pick out our plants and flowers at Lowe’s they were having a huge sale on small bags of Miracle Grow garden soil. Small bags to cover 2 cu. ft. were 4 for $10, so we bought them…a lot of them.

Once we had our box filled with soil, it was time to plant. We added two types of tomatoes, along with hot banana peppers, jalapenos and basil {which we’ll be transplanting to an in-progress vertical garden} and a ton of pretty and some edible flowers. this winter I’ll plant some bulbs for spring and next year, we’ll plant a ton more vegetables in the spring; we got a bit of a late start this year, so it was a little too late for many of the vegetables we’d originally wanted to plant.