Spring Garden

So DH and I planted a garden , FINALLY!
I've been wanting one for a few years & now I finally have one! So, last summer I got a rain barrel but we weren't sure how to do the garden....
I have the rain barrel on the side of the house towards the rear corner, the only place we could conceivably put it. BUT, the cable to the house & the electrical conduit to DH's workshop are buried on that side...so, no digging! We decided (a little too late) last year that we would just build raised beds.

So we set out to build our raised beds this spring. I looked up several different ways to go about it; most suggested using 1"x12" boards which in our case would be a little cost prohibitive. We were given quite a few 2x4's and we decided to "make do" with those.
We decided we wanted 2 beds that were four foot by eight foot...well 4x8 is not nearly as big as you might think it is. So after DH made the first one, we decided that the 2nd one needed to be bigger, but working in a limited space, it could only be longer. So we settled on 4x16.

Now these beds are on the side of the back yard which has a slight hill going down from the house toward the back and right. (That is 2 angles keep in mind.) It is a very slight hill, but it still posed problems in keeping the beds "level". (I will use that term loosely.) My suggestion was to angle the bottom boards so that it would remain level at the top. Like this:

Well, DH thought that that would cause too many problems in attaching the boards together, it would make them too thin at the point of angle to be able to nail them, yadda yadda yadda.... so he decided to do it the opposite way, like this:

"Whatever makes you happy, Pet."

So now the beds are built, they aren't going to win any beauty contests, but they'll hold dirt, and that's the important part here. Now normally DH is a master at woodworking, he's made beautiful bookshelves for our nephew and nieces, awesome Adirondack chars for my parents and some sizable shelves for me (OK, the first two alliterations were accidental, I just had to throw in the third for consistency's sake), and I think I may have hurt his feelings when I said that they wouldn't win any beauty contests, but they didn't look like most of his other work. I'll get some pics of the actual garden & beds to post later so you can see what I mean.

Now to fill the beds....