Moving the Garden Beds
fine-tuning the yardfarm
When you are doing heavy lifting and engaging in multi-faceted building projects, it is a good idea to think carefully before you place things. You don’t want to cut a hole in the side of a building just to see how the grand piano will look on the second floor (for example).
But even after careful planning, adjustment will sometimes become necessary. Not every factor is predictable, and sometimes issues only become evident over time.
When I consider how to adjust and improve the outdoor space, flower gardens and yardfarm (all on a fifth of an acre!) I don’t start from scratch each time. I consider, first, if there are any major problems that need to be changed or fixed. Looking around this year, I don’t see anything like that, so next I consider what can be made better, and I think of the vegetable garden beds.
I built four of these, next to each other in the backyard space, outside the fenced-in dog run and chicken pen. I feel these two are taking up more space than they need to, and that it would be nice to open up the limited yard area to allow for - perhaps - an outdoor dining table (maybe).
The garden beds can be shifted along the dog and chicken fence without losing much square footage.
So I put work gloves on and grabbed cardboard, a wheelbarrow, shovel and drill to:
place cardboard on the ground along the fence
drill apart the old garden beds (just held by 2 screws on each side and each end)
place the long boards next to the fence and upon the cardboard
shovel soil from the old garden bed onto the cardboard
when the soil was high enough to support it, put another board at the front of the soil
continue the process down the line, to join up with the existing garden bed at the end of the chicken yard
Then I planted some seedlings: tomatoes, daikon radish, corn (an experiment), purple sprouting broccoli and a mix of kale, plus some potatoes that were going green in the pantry and a bit of ginger. Since the soil still contains a good amount of wood chips, I first made a hole and put in some compost, them put the seedling in, added more compost and firmed it down. Once the line was planted, I watered them all well.
All of them were home grown, except the tomatoes (mine are still an inch tall). Now I suppose I need to start thinking about how to protect them from this fellow:
