This week has seen the completion of two major parts of our renovation process: the permeable pavers in the classroom area and the raised beds! From here we have lots of smaller projects to put the finishing touches on the garden and one big project – filling the beds with soil.

The guys doing the drainage work (I showed you the holes last week) go those all finished. After the rain on Monday night, the only place we had any water standing in the garden was in the lattice garden area right be the sidewalk. Oh well…it was too much to hope for that everything would be perfect!

We also theoretically have water! Well…we clearly have the hookups now, but we haven’t turned the water on to test it yet. We hope it works!

Last Friday was rather overcast, so it was a good opportunity to take some pictures of the classroom area without all the fun shadows. They had all the pavers laid except for the ones that needed cutting to fit around the edges.

Monday we fitted these decorative (and technically functional) metal corner braces onto the two red cedar raised beds.

Our crew also started constructing the plastic lumber raised bed. You can see that we’ve run out of extra soil and gravel to level things out on this end, so we’ll have to wait until we start filling the beds to get that part finalized.

The paver crew finished up the permeable pavers on Monday, so all the work by contractors is DONE! We also have our sign ready to be attached to the Demo Table.

We got all of our benches moved into the classroom area. Just imagine that the ferns are attentive students! These benches are heavy, so the Master Gardeners on call got a good workout.

This is a look at the finished plastic lumber bed. We used Azek decking, which is pretty expensive. This was the most expensive bed, but it should last for a long time! You can kind of see the two-tiered look, which maybe isn’t as dramatic as I hoped it would be, but I wasn’t about to buy more of this lumber. I think it will stand out more once the osoil is in and we have everything perfectly leveled.

Here’s a look at the finished garden, minus the soil, drip lines, and mulch. The construction is done! We’ve come a long way! If only there wasn’t 40 cu. yards of soil to move yet…not to mention all the paths to mulch…