Larri, Larri, quite contrary….

I’ve always been jealous of other people’s gardens.  Fresh grown tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, and green beans?  Yes please, I’ll take six.  Yummy!  My mouth would water with envy every summer at the thought of fresh caprese salads, sautéed green beans and gallons of homemade tomato sauce canned and stored for winter.  Well that longing ends now!

I am determined to claim a little piece of this heaven.  Homegrown salads WILL be on my dinner menu this summer!  I WILL make home-made pesto and it WILL be delicious!  Ladies and gents Larri’s gonna plant herself a garden.  Hold on to you chonies because things are going to get interesting!

All that determination aside, I have made a few small attempts in the past at gardening and they’ve all turned out miserably.  There was the spring I decided I was going to grow all the flowers for our wedding.  This Super Bride was going to save us hundreds by growing a bunch of random flowers in random sized pots I had picked up for pennies at a garage sale.  Thank god someone was smart enough to budget some “just in case” funds or we would have been stuck with one half dead calla lily.  I tried growing tomatoes in one of those topsy-turvy things.  People, children are supposed to be able to make those things produce tomatoes.  My plants never even got big enough to turn the dam contraption over.  Oh and I can’t forget the strawberries I tried to grow, also in pots on the deck.  I got one strawberry to grow.  The dog ate it.

There have also been several fresh herb gardens I have managed to slowly kill.  I plant one every year in a co-co nut husk lined window box hanging on our deck.  I have this fantasy of stepping out of my kitchen onto the deck for fresh herbs that I will eloquently toss into a gourmet meal I am effortlessly preparing.  I mentioned this is a fantasy right?  It’s usually dead before the summer is even half over and when I am cooking I can barely even remember what I have growing out there.  One year it got so dried out it caught fire and burned a hole through our deck.  You read that right.  My gardening skills are so bad I have STARTED THINGS ON FIRE!

After some thoughtful reflection I figured out what my problem was.  All of my gardening attempts have been in some sort of pot somewhere on our back deck.  Clearly that is the root of the problem.  If we are going to get serious results here we need some real estate to plant this garden.  I mentioned this to my Mom who, by the way, has a fabulous over producing garden every year, and she sent me some plans for DIY cedar planters.  Now all I had to do was convince J.  Considering the above mentioned fire it would be no small task to convince him that, not only would I be able to grow anything, but that we should dedicate an entire Saturday to building these planters.  I must have looked really good that day because somehow a few Saturday mornings ago we found ourselves at Home Depot (I like to call it THE De-Pot).

I had my DIY plans in hand and after some further guidance from the big harry guy at The De-pot we headed home to jerry-rig these bad boys together.

Those boards are actually cedar fence planks.  I read on the internets that cedar is weather resistant and to save money you can buy fence planks instead of cut lumber, so we did!  The big guy at The De-Pot suggested using grade steaks to hold everything together and steak the planters into the ground.  We pretty much winged it from there.  First we laid out all of the boards with a buddy.  We decided we were going to build them two planks high.

Then we used the grade steaks to stick them together like so:

Here is picture of J doing all the work while I stand around and “look for another drill”

We did fudge up and buy screws that were too long but one call to my Dad and he told us we could probably just knock off the excess with a hammer.  Sounds crazy right?  Wouldn’t you know it though, it totally worked:

Then J had to go to work.  I MIGHT have spent too much time wandering around the garden center at The De-pot fantasizing about my future garden.  Or I MIGHT have spent more time fake looking for tools and talking to my Dad on the phone than actually helping to build these things.  Either way we were out of time.  We packed it in and J headed to work.

Then I got a wild hair up my butt and decided it would be fabulous if I got them all finished before J got home from work.  It would be a, “surprise, aren’t you glad you don’t have to spend part of your Sunday finishing this crazy project” present.  So I called my little sister for help, we’ll call her Glitter.

She loves shit that sparkles.  But she has not always been this way.  When were kids she was quite the tomboy.  I have a vivid memory of an after-school program teacher asking what our favorite colors were and I sweetly replied “pink!” while she practically belched out “BLACK!”.  She was also always an athlete.  While she is my little sister in almost every sense of the word she could probably kick my ass.  I take that back, could definitely can kick my ass.  She is four years younger than me, at least 6 inches shorter, and probably a good 50lbs lighter.  She can also bench press a truck.  Even when she was in high school I used to call her She-Ra (remember her?  He-man’s sister).  I on the other hand have arms that resemble wet noodles.  Even in my brief athletic stent when I was “weight training” I had to use the light bar and never got more than ten pounds on it.  It was pretty pathetic.  It still is. 

Back to my point I needed someone with some guns to help me hammer these things into the ground.  She graciously agreed to help do all the work.  Honestly between the two of us and MB screwing them together and hammering them into the ground I bet we were done in less than hour.  J was pretty floored when he got home.  Probably mostly because we didn’t wreck anything. 

In all of their glory:

I know what you’re thinking, “what about your little herb garden you plant every year?”  Don’t you worry, I still made that happen.  Cross your fingers I don’t catch anything on fire!