Kate's Complete Guide to Building a Keyhole Garden

So, I decided to do a few things. One, I have decided to create a blog. Cue the trumpets. Yes, I have decided to create a blog because it's rather tedious to write everything in a facebook post that gets truncated or never uploaded because facebook is, well, facebook-ish. The second thing I decided to do was to build a keyhole garden. You may "ooh" and "ahh" now if you like. A keyhole garden, for those not familiar with it, is a raised garden bed (usually about 3-4 feet tall) made out of stuff you just got layin' around. That's right folks: building this puppy is F-R-E-E. This garden is typically used in South Africa where drought conditions are pretty tough and growing your own food can be almost impossible with the combined heat and dryness. So, the people of South Africa designed this garden. It uses about 1 gallon of water a day and utilizes home composting and fertilizer to feed the crops. It's pest resistant (and PET resistant) and oh so easy to maintain. This is the basic idea www.texascooppower.com

Seems pretty simple? Hah! Not when I do something! Oh, no! We must make things extra complicated here because complication is the spice of life! Or is that variety? I forget. Anyway, here is my how-to:

First, I carefully planned my garden.

Then I chucked my carefully laid plans and decided to wing it. Note: This is never a good idea.

Then I added some stones to the soil to help aerate it.

Put some sticks in there, too...

And covered it with dirt.

Then I realized what an idiot I was for not following my original plans.

And I started over.

The end result is rather dark, as you can see, because I finally finished it after two days of non-stop work.

Finally, at 6:45 at night I declared my masterpiece finished and collapsed into a heap inside. Tomorrow I'll plant some stuff in it. Maybe. If my back stops hurting.