Garden expansion project – Part 4 – Time to get dirty
April 15, 2018Ready to get dirty Garden Expansion Project status update
We’ve been super busy lately and now its time to get dirty. It’s been a little over two months since we gave a status update on our garden expansion project, so this post is a little overdue. This brief status update we’ll cover where we’re at in our project plan, what’s been going on with our seedlings. Ooh and just a smidge on our build. If you’ve not been following, you can catch up on our previous parts, Estimation, Planning, and our February Status update
Project plan status – on time and on budget
If you’re a project manager or part of any kind of delivery team, those words are like musical notes. It’s really what the customer wants to hear and what the boss wants to hear and is a happy status to report… And right now, it’s the reality of our garden expansion project. This doesn’t come without hardship though. The weather has been… uncooperative, and life’s little trials are having us divide our time into smaller sections than usual, but we always find time to spend in the garden with our leaf babies. Being on track time-wise and on budget are great, but when you get down to the details, there’s always… something that’s less than perfect.
First the good news
We bought our tools for the build and the weather (at least yesterday and last weekend) cooperated enough to get outside and move forward with prep work and build plans and let us get dirty leveling the new garden area. We even got a little time hardening our plants outdoors.
Now the bad news
The seedlings and starts are not happy, Their initial sprouting and germination went exceptionally well, but the conditions for our indoor planting area are less than ideal. The light provided by our four foot LED work lights is barely enough sustenance, and the cool temperatures 55-60 degrees Fahrenheit are also sub-par. We’ve moved many of our plants to a sunnier locale to accommodate and they’re recovering but its sad to see so many yellow leaves. We really need to get them outside to start hardening off, but the daytime temperatures really need to come up some more before we can start working on that.
Depending on how you look at it, the garden plot we picked out could be bad news too. We estimated a twenty by thirty foot plot for our garden expansion which would have been around six hundred square feet. As it turns out, we only had room for twenty-five by fifteen feet and while that doesn’t sound like much of a difference, straight line math comes out to three hundred seventy five feet which is two hundred twenty five square feet less than we’d planned for. We can adjust our planting to fit in the allotment, but its still a little disappointing.
We love to get dirty and starting the build let us do that
Here’s the after picture including a view of the neighbor’s swing set. For the money, that little Sun Joe cultivator is a real workhorse. Digging our 15 x 25 foot plot took us around six hours. It would have been less if we had done a little more prep and taken fewer breaks but we’re not beating ourselves up over it. Honestly the hardest part was not running over rocks… or the power cord.
