I’m impulsive and driven by nature. Once I get an idea in my head about something I want or need to do, it won’t leave my brain until it’s either in my hands or it’s done. We’ve recently undergone (and are still undergoing) a lot of changes to the house we bought six months ago.  We’ve painted the place, gutted and rebuilt the front porch (which is now beautiful and needs to be shared on my blog), demoed out our deck and finished off the privacy fence, and our outbuilding is currently being re-sided with fiber cement board.

Demoing the old, rotten deck was great, but it left us with a problem – what do we do with the 16’x16’ patch of dirt where the deck used to be?

I decided last night that I desperately wanted to create my own vegetable “victory” garden, and I would need raised beds to do it. Since we’ve been hemorrhaging money to have all this work done on the house, I didn’t want to spend a ton of money on the supplies to build raised beds. I started thinking, and then Googling, and then it hit me! I rushed out to the storage room in the outbuilding where we kept several pieces of old furniture left by the previous owner. An old dresser and two bookshelves would make awesome raised beds! They are all sturdy, made of real wood, and should survive three wet Pacific Northwest seasons just fine. If I didn’t use them, they were otherwise going to sit in storage until I had a yard sale.

We arranged them, and then Tim drilled drainage holes in the bottom of everything.

Next came the sixteen 1.5 cu ft bags of gardening soil. And then I planted. Viola!

I still have to stagger the seed planting so that everything isn’t ready at the same time, but I made a lot of progress today. It was honestly a kind of soul-cleansing to sit outside in the cool Pacific Northwest air and dig my hands into the soil. The smell of manure was pungent, but it took me right back to summers in Indiana. Not a lot of opportunities to smell livestock here on the peninsula.

I spent hours in the chilly air, I have dirt embedded beneath my nails, I’m just now getting to fix a late dinner, but my victory garden is ready to go and I feel amazing.

Victory over what, you might ask? Well… Hmmm… Victory of store-bought vegetables? Victory over wasting and not re-purposing things? Victory over sitting inside and staring at a screen all day? Victory over Donald Trump? (Let’s hope!) I suppose I’m calling it a victory garden simply because I can!

Once the work is done on our outbuilding, I’ll be posting before and after photos of all the work we’ve done on our little quarter-acre piece of serenity!