Up to Our Ears
This weekend was the first time in over a month that we've been able to get back to prepping the garden beds. August definitely got away from us, with going to Pennsylvania, hosting visitors, and getting our summer fun in before the start of school. Remember that crabgrass that got a foothold in July while we were at the beach? Here's what that looks like now:
So we spent this weekend clearing the weeds out of two more quadrants of the garden. This went more easily than we expected because the weeds are starting to die back now that they've gone to seed. I'm sure all the seed that got dropped will plague us for seasons to come, but if we're lucky most of it will be buried too deep in the beds to ever germinate.
After the weeding we covered one quadrant in black plastic.
This will protect it from any more weeds taking root until we can get to it again. This quadrant is pretty empty of any soil at all, so we will need to order more loam at some point. We may or may not get to filling this before it snows.
The other quadrant had loads of dirt in it, so we began moving it around and adding compost to prep the beds. My job was to take a shovel and move topsoil from the big piles here:
And shovel it into the empty center bed over here:
While I worked on that, Kirk brought wheelbarrows of compost over from the driveway and layered it on the plain dirt (which you can see here--the compost is the pretty black dirt). It takes longer than you might think to fill up 142 cubic feet of planting area by the shovelful, but we got it done:
The center bed is ready to go, and it will be (at least partially) filled with garlic just as soon as we get the cloves in the mail from Burpee. The outer ring of this quadrant will need much more compost (we're out) and probably more loam. We didn't cover that up with plastic because we are hoping to get to that before September is over.
Right now each quadrant is in various stages of completion. A bird's eye view to keep you oriented:
I think the remaining weedy quadrant is the next on our list of priorities. If we could get that cleared out next weekend, we could go back to being normal people who have friends over and stuff.
So we spent this weekend clearing the weeds out of two more quadrants of the garden. This went more easily than we expected because the weeds are starting to die back now that they've gone to seed. I'm sure all the seed that got dropped will plague us for seasons to come, but if we're lucky most of it will be buried too deep in the beds to ever germinate.
After the weeding we covered one quadrant in black plastic.
This will protect it from any more weeds taking root until we can get to it again. This quadrant is pretty empty of any soil at all, so we will need to order more loam at some point. We may or may not get to filling this before it snows.
The other quadrant had loads of dirt in it, so we began moving it around and adding compost to prep the beds. My job was to take a shovel and move topsoil from the big piles here:
And shovel it into the empty center bed over here:
While I worked on that, Kirk brought wheelbarrows of compost over from the driveway and layered it on the plain dirt (which you can see here--the compost is the pretty black dirt). It takes longer than you might think to fill up 142 cubic feet of planting area by the shovelful, but we got it done:
The center bed is ready to go, and it will be (at least partially) filled with garlic just as soon as we get the cloves in the mail from Burpee. The outer ring of this quadrant will need much more compost (we're out) and probably more loam. We didn't cover that up with plastic because we are hoping to get to that before September is over.
Right now each quadrant is in various stages of completion. A bird's eye view to keep you oriented:
I think the remaining weedy quadrant is the next on our list of priorities. If we could get that cleared out next weekend, we could go back to being normal people who have friends over and stuff.
I love the layout of your growing beds. How creative! I'm sure it will be spectacular next year.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, those weed seeds will surely come back to haunt you. But they always do no matter what. LOL!
I know, right? When we visited England we were so floored by how pristine everything seemed in the gardens and farms. But they've had hundreds and hundreds of years to get it under control...here we're still beating back the wilderness!
ReplyDelete