August 16, 2008 - Too Darned Hot!

We've hit a period of 100F-plus weather. It's too darned hot to go out in the sun, and even the summer squash are taking some time off! After all those zucchinis I've been dealing with, I'm now down to picking maybe one or two every other day. I'm enjoying their "vacation" for now.

Thursday I talked Mr. Husband into going to Lowe's to look at options for the four new garden beds I want to put in now for the 2009 season. I had to keep it relatively cheap, as I'm still hearing how I made him give away most of the pile of nice redwood 2"x6"x10' boards he'd stashed in our garage after removing the deck from our house several years ago. Of course, this year I decided to build the raised beds, and I have used up the remaining lumber....and need MORE! But Mr. H. said if I bought more 2x6s, it would be over his dead body. Well, I've had Mr. H. around for 46 years now, and I'm not quite ready to kill him off, so I decided I'd go with those cherry wood landscape timbers. The ones at Lowe's were mostly crooked and twisted, so we had to sort through the entire pile just to find 12 good ones, and I needed 20 for the four beds I wanted to build. Actually, I wanted 40 so I could make them twice as high, but I certainly knew that was out of the question.

The dozen timbers were stacked on the cart, then we headed to the other side of the store (these places are about a mile from one end to the other, aren't they?) to buy some rebar. Our idea was to drill holes through the timbers and pound rebar through them to hold them in place. Well, they didn't have any short lengths available, and no way was I going to pound a six-foot rod through those timbers, and anyway they were much more expensive than we'd remembered.

So we went to look, over Mr. H's dead body, at 2x6s. They happened to have some treated ones on sale (pine, not the lovely redwood), and if I used them, I had enough scraps of the old boards to make the ends. And if I construct the strawberry beds from the good sections of the 4x4s that were the posts from the fence that got smashed, then I only need 6 boards. I'll use the deck screws I already have, so the beds won't cost as much as I'd originally thought.

I wonder if Mr. H's body would get any deader if I doubled up on those boards to make the beds deeper?

And, Mr. Lowe's employee, I'm sorry I left that cart of 12 cherry landscape timbers there in the lumber section, but that store is about a mile from one end to the other, isn't it?