Getting Ready for Spring: Planter Boxes

It’s almost spring here in L.A. (I know, it’s January, don’t be jealous.) It’s time to start planning for spring gardens.  This year I am determined to have a good producing garden and to that end, we built planter boxes. (We meaning I told Sean I’d like planter boxes and he built them.)

The planter boxes will solve our horrible soil problem. We have very sandy soil. Not good for growing things. Now I’ll have boxes filled with nice soil.

Here are the boxes. There are 6, 4 small and 2 large.  Sean has claimed one. The other 5 are all mine.

One of the small boxes

Here’s a closer look. Sean made the boxes with 2 2×4′s stacked and nailed to 4 posts in the corners. The posts are buried in the ground a few inches. He used PCV pipe in the corners for a place to put the bendable white tubes. We’ll put bird netting over them to keep the chickens out of the boxes. With clear plastic, I could probably turn them into greenhouses. There is hardware cloth on the bottom to prevent gophers or other things from digging up into the boxes.

Next, we got the dirt. It’s less expensive to order it bulk, so we did that.

A dump truck full of dirt

Then we had to move it, as well as the pea gravel we got to go between the boxes. We layered wet cardboard under the dirt to help prevent weeds from growing through before putting in the dirt. Wet newspaper also works.

The girls thought it was a lot of fun. Surprisingly, they weren’t that much actual help.

After 2 days of hauling dirt and gravel, we still have a small pile of both on our driveway. We also have lovely new planter boxes waiting for my plants to go in them in early March.

Chicken approved