Retaining Wall

This past weekend we built a retaining wall around the perimeter of the garden bed my dad and I made on Easter weekend. It makes our front yard look so organized and neat! I looooooooooove it.

Before:
We used those wedge-shaped concrete blocks you see everywhere in recent subdivisions. A few weekends ago we tried to buy some at Home Depot--the sales person checked the inventory system and it indicated that there were over 800 of them in stock. The lady wandered around the garden area, then radioed someone in the back to check, but to no avail. All we could find were a few chipped blocks on a broken pallet. But we wanted to buy a whole pallet (about 120 blocks). Apparently their inventory system needs some work. Since Home Depot doesn't offer a whole-pallet discount, charges a fortune for residential delivery, and couldn't even guarantee us an exact delivery date if we special ordered a full pallet, we just gave up and left.

On a whim this Saturday before the matinee showing of Burn After Reading, we drove Clifford the Big Red Truck downtown to the Ace Hardware rock yard to see how much similar retaining blocks cost. No more than 10 minutes later we were driving very low and very slow with a whole pallet of tan blocks in the bed of the truck. After the pallet discount, the Ace blocks were only $40 more than what they would have cost at Home Depot. We're always happy to pay a little more to buy something here in town, especially from a store with such good customer service.

After the movie we dug out the edge of the bed, put down a layer of sand, then placed the blocks. Leveling each block was time consuming, back-breaking work. We were hunkered down in an Asian squat for a couple of hours hoisting those 23-pound blocks in and out of the trench as we adjusted the bed of sand until it was level. Dave thought the blocks were light--I thought Dave was crazy (and much, much stronger than me).

During:Last night after work I tilled-in about 80 gallons of compost (two garbage cans full) and some inorganic N-P-K fertilizer. Then I wired up another sprinkler valve and laid out 150 feet of black soaker hose. I can't find the user's manual for the irrigation timer so I didn't program the new set-up yet. Hopefully I can get that done before leaving for Gualala this weekend.

After:
My plan is to plant some bushes and ground cover along the edges and then fill in the middle with winter veggies. I think multi-color quinoa and rainbow Swiss chard will look pretty out there, along with little rows of carrots and radishes--all plants that will suffer no ill effects if the dogs pee on them or plow through them occasionally.

After all that work I was starving so I made corned beef hash using potatoes we harvested from our garden:
We'd never grown potatoes before, and chose to try red and purple ones. The "seed" potatoes were from the Seed Savers Exchange but I've since been told that we can just use organic new potatoes (or big baking varieties like Russets, I suppose) instead. According to my dad, once the plants start growing you're supposed to pile the soil up over the base of the plant continuously throughout the season so that you end up with a really deep root system (and thus tons of potatoes). My dad tells me that hippies often grew potatoes in stacks of old tires; they'd just stack up additional tires and fill them with soil as the plant grew--sort of like a tower of potatoes. (Ok, I added the "hippies" part--but growing potatoes in a stack of old tires sounds like something hippies would do, right?)

Or you can just plant the seed potatoes, water regularly, and forget about it. That's what we did and it was quite successful: