Garden Work

Oh man what a mess my gardens were after a year of neglect!

I’ve spent a little time out pulling weeds here and there in the front garden beds – wild onions have taken over and I’ve easily pulled a dozen butterfly bush startups.  The Engineer and I cut back the two overgrown butterfly bushes a couple weeks ago… couldn’t walk past one on one side nor drive past the other on the other side – that’s how bad it was.  The chickweed is terrible around the pond… I may just cover it with plastic and hope that smothers it out – the winter wasn’t cold enough to kill it…. hmmm maybe a torch if all else fails?

Out back at the raised beds I needed some help…

I went through a couple weeks ago and pulled the overgrown grassy weeds hanging in the beds out and pushed them over into the paths.  It was clear I was going to need some help pulling the weeds and finishing the clean up.  I have 4 raised beds… they are 12” tall and measure 2’ wide x 16’ long.  In the picture above – the two on the far right have strawberries, the next one currently has leftover onions and at the end of the box is sage and oregano.  The box on the far left with the T-poles is for tomatoes.  We built these boxes back in May of 2009 – and added the T-poles in May of 2010.  We have a fella we hire when we need a little extra help getting things done – great guy and a hard worker.  I couldn’t have gotten this all cleaned up myself.  First some before pictures…

Strawberry bed #1

Strawberry bed #2other 2 beds

My daughter put out some onion sets last year when she was here with me – then the weeds came and I didn’t pull but a few.  These are what have come back this year.  My overgrown sage plant is at the far end with an oregano plant coming up just this side of it.  Amongst the weeds in this strawberry bed there was a rabbit nest – there were bunnies in this a couple weeks ago when I first worked out here but they were up and gone within a few days of my finding them.

Nice and clean!  The strawberry beds needed some reinforcing – something we apparently did with the other 2 beds before.  The Engineer added the boards on the outside at the joint and added some rebar spikes that we can screw to the boards on the inside.  The wooden spikes we used originally to build the beds a few years ago had rotted out in several spots.

We will be building a new bed for the strawberries which will run in the other direction at the far end of these current beds.  I’ll collect the new runners this year and put them over there and then the strawberries will be pulled and we will backfilled to bring the dirt level up again so they can be planted with other stuff.

I’m not sure how long I’ll give these onions to get going – lots of leaves but not much bulbs yet… maybe getting my watering system in will help.

Still lots to do…