If there is anything I have learned about gardening over the last 5 years it is that it is never something you “finish,” just something you “keep doing.” Jul and I are constantly moving things around as we figure out the yard. Things you put in one place, grow differently than you expect, or look wrong a year later, or just should be in another place. I remember reading an interview in Sunset of a famous gardener who admitted she drove her husband nuts because she was constantly moving things around. She talked about how they would be 15 minutes away from guests arriving for dinner and she would be moving the Japanese Maple to a new location in the yard.

When plants at Fiori no longer look like somebody would buy them Jul gets to bring them home. So we would plant these little half-dead hydrangea sticks and the next season they would grow up into huge plants. Given their affinity for shade, we planted many of the hydrangea in an area that was shaded by a large evergreen in our neighbor’s yard. A couple years ago the evergreen was cut down and we had a set of the most unhappy hydrangea you could imagine. Nothing is worse than cranky hydrangea.

This month we finally embarked on a mass relocation campaign which involved much digging, swearing, and sweating (DSS) with the goal of putting a vegetable garden in their place. It is remarkably hard to find homes in the shade for 20 hydrangea. The soil was like cement so I spent last weekend tilling it with a pickaxe and leveling the ground. Last night I finished the putting together the raised vegetable beds and filling them with planting dirt (compost + sand + peat). My favorite part of the job was going to the “dirt store” where they sell dirt, rocks, and other fun stuff. The place is filled with massive piles of everything you can imagine. You pull up in a truck and a guy in a tractor/backhoe dumps the dirt into the back. I just kept thinking, “if I had this at my disposal when I was young and playing in the sandbox there would have been no limit to what I could have accomplished.” (If you are interested it takes 1.5 yards of soil to fill 1000 cubic feet of vegetable bed.) I had hoped to put the beds together using dowels but I lacked the tool infrastructure I was used too at my parents house. After my “investment” in redwood timbers it seemed unwise (from a marital relationship perspective) to invest further. Instead I ended up using large lag screws to bolt together the bottom 4×4’s and then huge nails to drive the second row of 4×4’s. I like to think of that as a “practical optimization.” A few key things I learned:

1. It is remarkable hard to make the ground level
2. I need to find more reasons to go to the dirt store
3. Redwood, while the “right thing” to use to build vegetable beds, is remarkably expensive
4. You should check with your wife before buying and cutting-up remarkably expensive wood
5. Our vegetable beds will last for all of eternity

Photos here:

http://flickr.com/photos/happyinwater/19046134/in/set-448011/