New raised beds!

Last year, when we took down the old fence, which was really, really old, and probably made of wood from the orchard that used to be here, we burned most of it in the fireplace. But some of it we repurposed into raised beds, as seen above. We filled them with compost and turned over sod, mulched ‘em, and left them for more than a year. Then, this year, we planted them with tomatoes and potatoes, and cucumber and squash and pumpkins and so on. That worked out so well that this fall, John has decided to try the square-foot gardening thing that we hear so much about! So he put in the three beds you see in the picture below. We’ve since planted them with some root crops, just to see what happens. They have sprouted, but we don’t think they will actually mature before winter sets in. It doesn’t matter really. It’s an experiment. It’s hardly ‘waste’ to put a couple of seeds in the ground!







Other things you can see in the photos: At the back of the right-hand photo, you can see a little roofed patio, that actually has a fireplace in it, which is totally sweet. The riot of foliage at the front of that is a grape vine that I wrote about in a previous post. At the back of the beds are two gray trash cans (one tipped over on it’s side). This is our active compost system. There’s a bat box on the utility pole, which has not attracted any bats, unfortunately. We think maybe there are too many other great places to live. And finally, an old satellite dish mount sticks up to the right of the utility pole. I have designs on that as a mount for a solar oven, if’n I ever get around to it. It’s already set up on an equatorial mount, and so it would be trivial to put a little tracking motor on to track the Sun.

We’ve tried lots of different path-making materials, and you can see one of them in the top picture---pea gravel. The jury is still out on whether we like it more, less, or the same as other options.