This is not my garden, this is just my favorite garden picture. I love looking at it and imagining that it IS my garden where everything is perfect and orderly and all it took was one chick in a hat. Last year I planted things directly into the ground with no border or raised beds. Some things did well but most were quickly overtaken by creeping grass and weeds. For example, here's a bean bed with weeds working their way in.
In an effort to keep them at bay I tried putting down weed blocker which does work very well but weeds can start to grow even if a sliver of light gets through and then it sucks to try and pull them from between the slits.
Just before the winter my lovely Louis built me these raised beds so that I could experiment with hoop houses. The farther bed was used for seedlings in early spring and the second I planted with garlic. These are 8x4ft rectangles made with pressure treated eco-friendly 2x12 planks from Home Depot. The 12 in depth is ideal for root-heavy produce.
The raised beds were so great to work with that I decided the whole garden should slowly get morphed into a raised bed garden- some things like corn, squash, watermelon, pumpkin and flowers excluded. SO after buying a lot of lumber and meeting a handyman down the street who helped us, we went from this:
To this:
To, finally, this:
Its heaven to me. I love working out there after a long day of staring at a computer like Dilbert. You can see the fountain I bought that's still not put together, it's just hanging out in the center of the garden waiting to be stacked and set up properly in it's stunning 5 tier state. My overall plan for the garden is to have flower beds in the middle with the fountain at the center of it all. Maybe next spring- there's not enough time to do it all!
The boxes for the rest of the garden were made in 8x4 boxes but this time we used 2x6 planks....in hindsight, we should have stuck with 2x12 planks. We didn't realize how intense the sloping got in some areas, we had to dig down with a spade to level them which means that some ends of the boxes are almost level with the ground while the other end of the box is 4-5 inches above ground level. over time I'll just add a plank level so it'll all work out but for now it's a lot of work to keep the grass from growing straight over some of them.
Those giant green things in the picture above are what lettuce looks like in late July after it's "bolted" and "gone to seed". All that means is that they turn into giant dandelions - the lettuce gets super bitter and the plants send out fluffy seeds from the top. This is what it looks like a month before-
Those little specs in the picture above are crushed eggshells to keep slugs away. One thing we have an abundance of is banana sized slugs- they won't crawl over anything sharp so eggshells are an easy way to keep them from taking over.
The boxes have made things a lot easier but as you can see in between the egg shells, grass still finds a way in so I still have to pull it out pretty regularly. Putting straw down didn't really help but it was worth a shot. I do think that the straw helped with maintaining moisture levels.
I've debated what it would take to put down pebbles to replace the grass walkways and it's an undertaking. Especially because my garden plot isn't level- it slopes down gradually. You can kind of see it sloping in the picture above. Here's another favorite garden porn picture I like to stare at for pebble inspiration.
From what I can tell, level is pretty important in the gravel ones so I'll stick with what I've got. Pebble looks pretty but the vibrant green of fresh cut grass is great too.
As of an hour ago I finally finished canning all my excess tomatoes and bell peppers. They are now 22 jars of kick ass salsa and 5 jars of deeelicious pasta sauce. I'll share those recipes in my next post!
