raised garden

spinach & cheese ravioli, asparagus, cream puffs, late night bowl of cereal

Up at my parents' house, or is it our new house, or it is Howard & Anne's old house? We're putting in new garden beds, rennovating. In particular, we're working on a steep-angled, raised bed along a long wall. I work on pulling the gravel up into berms to expose rows for planting, while a friend of my brother puts in these shrubs, which we refer to as lavender. At some point I notice that he's cut the front of the bed very steeply, and I'm afraid it will collapse. I complain to him about it, but he insists it's the right thing. He shows me a sort of laundry basket and says we will lay them in up under the edge of the bed as a kick-space, because people are always kicking the edges of garden beds as they look and damage them, so isn't this better?

I concede, but I don't really know, and I'm certain that these baskets don't have the structural strength to hold up the earth above them. I'm put in charge of scoping the bed, to set it up for these finishing touches. I go down to one end and find that now that he has cut away the front angle of earth, it turns out that this garden is actually built on a wooden frame with a corrugted fiberglass flat underneath-- the dirt is only a few inches deep, and it's completely hollow underneath. I fit a basket up under, and wonder about cats or other animals getting up under this thing-- what if they get stuck? I ask the guy how plants are going to grow in such shallow dirt, but he seems unperturbed.