Borouz Woodworking

One of the things we like best about raised beds is the ability to work without having to bend down to or get down on the ground.  As we get older, this becomes a much bigger issue.  We have found that with a 2 foot high raised bed, we can bring a lawn chair up to the bed and work on it while seated.  This allows us to spend more time working without tremendous discomfort or pain.

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6 years ago (has it only been six years?  Wow!), our initial “raised bed” garden was a fenced in area behind the shop.  The beds were about 8″ tall 4′ by 4′,  made with wood that we had milled from our trees and we used the square foot method.  I loved my garden.  I would throw a board across the top of two beds and sit there and weed, listen to the birds and the wind and just be happy.  Time passed, life happened, and I went through a little time where my health was not great.  I thought gardening had passed me by.

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Bill originally built the shaker deck to help harvest potatoes.  For years we have grown potatoes in bags, not in ground, not in raised beds.  It just works better for us.  We will probably never get the huge harvests that other methods provide but we are happy.  Frankly happy is a pretty good outcome for anything that you do in life.  The shaker deck made bag harvest simple and quick.  We could work through 50 bags in a short amount of time and not miss a single spud.  This year we put the shaker deck to work breaking up bags of dirt and adding amendments to reclaim the dirt.

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Having a greenhouse always seemed to be an out of reach dream.  The entry cost was prohibitive.  We struggle with flat land up here.  We also struggle with sunlight and a fear of trees.   Case in point yesterday I was out looking at the grapes and found a rather large limb laying in between two of the beds.  It had hit the wire and mercifully missed damaging the grapes themselves.  One tree, with branches that slightly overhang the driveway, had managed to land on our grapes.  Imagine if that had been a glass structure, or even plexi glass.  You might say,  well that flimsy film with light weight aluminum poles will get smashed too, and you would be right.  The difference is in the money invested and ease of repair.

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I would love to report that the battle is mine!  That would be a lie.  Everyday when I go down and check there are spider mites, mostly on the same plants.  Watching while flats of growing things melt into dust can take the wind out of even the most optimistic person’s sails.

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First let me pause a minute to take in the fact that I just typed, “Seed Starting Room”.  Those are wonderful words.  Also a fancy name for mechanical room but still, renaming it makes it seem exotic and extraordinary.  Things have been going well since December.  We have kept fungus gnats to a whisper by boiling water and using that to hydrate our potting soil and seed starting mixes.  We only buy from inside the store which should help  to keep bugs to a minimum while hurting the budget to the maximum.  We have used mosquito pellets in the water and top water.    Flowers were actually flowering, plants were luxurious and getting big, seed germination was high this year.   Then on April 1st things took a turn.

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In the fall of 2024, we purchased two inexpensive hoop house greenhouses from Amazon, one 7′ x 12′, and one 10′ x 20′.  We set up the smaller one up by the house, to be used for starting plants and herbs.  You can read more about them here:  Greenhouses

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