The old side of our house.
The kind dude from Menard's shows up ass-early with all those railroad ties. We should note that the bags on the far end are mostly gravel that we estimated would provide a modest layer for drainage across the bottom of the bed. More on that later.
The bed under construction. As you can see, our final plan called for interlocking layers. Those railroad ties are freaking heavy, let me tell you. At one point Chris shoved and I hadn't moved and we split my toe open and jammed the nail up under itself. That sucked a lot.
Our great supplier was Chad from Brummett Enterprising. He was SO HELPFUL. Here, he and Chris are discussing options for dumping the eight thousand pounds (8,000 lbs, or 4 tons) of gravel into the drive without missing the tarp.
Finally, all the gravel made it into the bed. Not so much with the 10 piddly bags we originally bought. We have learned much.
So then we got the mulch blend, which was awesome. Steaming hot, light, shredded mulch mixed with topsoil, then left to decompose for awhile before arriving in our driveway.
Unfortunately, I can't find other intermediary pictures at the moment, but this is all the dirt in the bed. All told, we have 28,000 pounds of gravel, mulch blend, and topsoil in there. Basically, Chris, Christopher, and I collectively moved 28,000 pounds of stuff over the last several months. That's shocking.
Christopher and I rented a tiller and had a hoot with that. All that's left is to drill holes for the rebar supports and plant my poor plants that have been languishing on the porch since early May. They're hanging in there, with only a few casualties so far.
Next year, there will be tons of pictures of a healthy, happy garden thriving in that big-ass flower bed.
