Zest Garden!

by Zest it Up

8 Materials

$50

4 Hours

Easy

Even though we have been kept pretty darn busy with weddings and tastings this wedding season, we have managed to find time for some heavy lifting and landscaping this growing season. For those of you who are not in the “know,” we started a Zest Garden last year. Being able to grow things that are difficult to source or that we just plain-old use a lot of has been awesome!

We have had so much fun watching things shape up one project at a time in the Zest Garden. It’s obviously satisfying watching things grow, but we have been preoccupied with some bigger projects!

Original Blog Post

Photo Cred: Anya McInroy

From using steel wool and vinegar to make our new wood match the old wood we used for our planters, to…..

…unearthing small rocks to build little planters for our herbs. However, our biggest project by far was our living wall. Wanting to create a cohesive green backdrop to our Zest Garden, we opted to get creative with cement, 4″x4″‘s, steel wire and boulders! Legit!

Since our soil is riddled with crazy huge boulders, the option to sink some 4″x4″‘s was more than a Herculean feat. It was darn near impossible. I mean, you literally dig an inch and hit another boulder as soon as you have just unearthed a boulder. It is crazy! So, like our raised beds, we decided to stay above ground. Using 5 gallon buckets, Quickrete, and some pressure treated 4″x4″‘s, we created our vertical supports for our wall.

Then it was time to load up the truck! Massive girl-power, y’all! These were boulders that had already been dug out due to other projects, so no we are not completely insane.

Now that we had created rock (boulder) planters around our 5 gallon buckets and things were feeling secure, we measured out spaces to drill through our 4″x4″‘s.

Our idea was to string some steel wire that would support some beautiful vining plants.

We poked the wire through the hole we drilled and wrapped it around the post.

We continued to string the wire across all of the posts to get our "living wall" effect.

Disclaimer, we at first thought that wisteria would be a gorgeous backdrop, but after planting it and then thinking about it for a couple of days…we freaked!

Wisteria is so crazy that we knew in a short while, we would see our boulder planters destroyed as the massive plant pushed through every crevice. No thank you!