How I became a gardener

It’s April Cools’ again. To celebrate, some friends and I made content outside our normal brands. Here goes mine.

2022 was an exciting year for me. For starters, I changed jobs. But more importantly, my girlfriend moved in with me into my place in Schwabing, a lively, conveniently-located quarter in Munich.

Since both of us were working at home, we quickly realized the same thing that other pandemic-era office-worker couples realized: The one-bedroom flat is too small for two parallel calls;¹ we need more space.

Fortunately, we quickly found a more spacious place. It is in a residential neighbourhood, built in the 50s and 60s when free plots were ample, therefore comprising mostly single-family homes or houses with only few units. Because of that, the new place came with a decently-sized garden.

I grew up in a rural area—a village with a mere 150 inhabitants—so I knew how hard it is to tend to a garden. Consequently, I never wanted to become a gardener. It is easy to see why I was initially a bit sceptical about doing anything beyond the occasional lawn-mowing.

Long story short: I (or rather we) are now doing a lot beyond the occasional lawn-mowing. In particular, we now have two massive raised beds out of steel.

“We should grow some veggies”

It started with the desire to grow some veggies. There were already a bunch of beds scattered around the garden. However, there are a lot of snails, rendering the enterprise futile.

My girlfriend proposed that we fix this by growing the stuff in raised beds. There are a lot of choices of material, e.g. wood and stone, but eventually we settled on weathering steel. Not only will they be sturdy and indestructible, but also repelling slugs, who supposedly harbour an intense dislike of rust.

Like in a good software project, the estimated difficulty of this project differed between the two of us. (My girlfriend rated it Grande, while I rated it Venti.²)

Like in a good software project, the estimated difficulty was dwarfed by the real difficulty. (It turned out to be Trenta.)

Be steel my beating heart

We decided to install the raised beds on the Southern side of the garden. One of the older beds used to be there, which has since been overgrown, turning it into a real eyesore.

Following backlog refinement, we decided to split up the planned monolithic bed into two smaller ones. Extensive market research suggested an Austrian supplier of bespoke steel accessories. We ordered a pair of beds, measuring 240 cm in length, 120 cm in width, 80 cm in height, and 3 mm in thickness.³

That was in August 2023. Little did I know what would await us.

The metal rectangles got delivered early October, shortly before we went on holidays to India, followed by a business trip to Hong Kong. The hauling company dropped them on the driveway and our neighbour thankfully helped us to move them out of the way to the back of the house. There, they would loom, ominously, monolith-style, until final installation.⁴

Gravelling to the garden

I returned mid-November from my trip. We wanted to install the beds before the winter (in hindsight: very good thinking), to be able to fill them before spring comes around. So: no time to lose.

After procuring the beds themselves, the next story in the epic was to bed them. I picked a spade and got to spading.⁵ The plan was to remove the topsoil and replace it with gravel to have a solid foundation.⁶

The area I had to dig was about 4 meters (2.40 m length plus twice 0.80 m for paving) times 5 meters (twice 1.20 m width plus paving between and around), totalling 20 square meters (for my American readers: approximately 6 square fathoms). The ground in Munich is rocky in the literal sense, so I only had to dig about one spade deep. The weather was not exactly nice, but I prioritized this story to keep the tight deadline.

Around the same time, I tried getting 2 cubic metres of gravel delivered. Unfortunately, for the big suppliers (construction companies), this was too little, and for the small suppliers (hardware stores), it was out of season.

But due to dumb luck, I managed to snatch a delivery slot. What happened?

I was on the phone with the store. The clerk was telling me that they won’t be able to deliver it this year. Truthfully, I responded: hang on, I will ask my wife. He immediately replied: no need, let me see what I can do. You can imagine my face.

Anyway, the gravel got delivered and with some extra help, we got to shovelling again. End of November we could finally place the beds.

Fill me up

Early December, a big snow storm covered southern Germany in chaos. As you can see in the picture, the beds were hardly visible (neither was the rest of the garden).

Only two weeks later, the weather turned mild and sunny again. We used that window of opportunity to fill in the beds with various layers.⁷

Among them was compost, green waste, leaves, and some of the soil I had removed earlier. For better or worse, a lot of the green waste accrued during the storm; some of the bushes and trees in our garden couldn’t withstand the weight of the snow. Additionally, the cherry laurel that had expanded too much—thereby swallowing a whole other tree—provided ample material.

Before Christmas, we were done with the first round of stacking.

Chasing pavements

When we returned to Munich after Christmas (or “between the holidays”, as we say in German), I decided to buy some stones to pave around the beds. The initial plan was to reuse the odd (flat) stones that were still in the garden from way back, but due to stakeholder feedback, we changed this to honeycomb-style grass paving. Those stones are deep and robust, but thanks to the holes, not that heavy.

I shanghaied my brother-in-law to drive to the hardware store and load up on some stones. We definitely did not overload his small delivery van with almost a ton of them (that’s about 20 cwt, dear American readers).

Much to the amusement of, well, literally everyone who knows me, I laid the pavement around the beds. I come from a family of craftspeople and contractors, found out early that I have two left hands, and now this. The irony of that very person, decades later, using a rubber mallet⁸ and a mechanic’s level was not lost on me.

Still in 2023, I completed the pavement and, if I daresay myself, it wasn’t a complete disaster.

Can I get a refill?

In the first quarter of 2024, we continually refilled the beds, because the compost kept autoscaling itself. Additionally, we re-seeded the part of the lawn where for a few months, the big heap of excavated soil sat. (We have a lot of moss anyway, which somehow compelled me to attend a whole seminar on lawn care.) In the process we obtained a whole bunch of new devices; some of them I knew existed but never thought I would ever own one (like a gritter).

You may now be waiting for the final pictures of the abundant veggies that have hitherto grown. But I have to disappoint you: this story must end here.

First, we could not get the top layer of humus-rich soil delivered in time for April Cools’.

Second—more importantly—it is not yet time for planting outdoors. We have planted indoors though, e.g. tomatoes, and plan to move them as soon as the weather allows.

So, stay tuned, maybe until next year, when the project will have (hopefully) born fruit?

If you enjoyed this, why not head over to the April Cools’ Club website to see all other projects?