project i've been trying to get done this fall, weather has not been cooperating...
another project i did get done (cleaning up this garden and while we were at it we put in The Road to No Wear) this past summer.
songbird
Looks good to me. What is it going to eventually become?
All of that is your garden My back hurts in sympathy with yours!
How do you keep grass seeds out of your garden? I don't eve have a lawn, and I can't keep them out!
once i get the drain tubes down then i'm filling that trench back in and we'll top it with the limestone. i wanted to reclaim some space by shifting the existing limestone over but was overruled on that.
it was getting too dangerous with those pallets rotting. rusty nails all over and if you walked on them you'd fall through.
the end of that ditch used to be open to the bigger drainage ditch and so the animals/critters would use it as a highway to get up into the gardens. so i finally plugged up the end with a bunch of rocks and rubble and also fenced it so nothing will get through there easily. before i did that i put down a chunk of drain tube so i have an extra run through for when we get heavy rains.
the drain tubes and pea gravel are being pulled out of an existing garden:
originally this garden was supposed to be bigger so i'll finally be leveling it off and will have more room for more garden veggies. :)
that's only one of them:
there's been a lot of changes since that picture... :) always stuff to do. i've been combining gardens and also expanding others or reclaiming them and getting rid of pathways. it is much easier for me to take care of a larger garden (fewer edges more flexibility in planting).
we don't have much lawn left either and i'd be quite happy to turn that into gardens.
along the edges have a good border that you can scrape with a stirrup hoe once in a while. gardens will never be free of weeds but the better your edges are and the more space you have between any grassy seed source areas and the neigboring gardens will help.
the wind and water flows will move seeds around but anything that sprouts gets scraped by the stirrup hoe and ends up as worm food.
keeping areas covered with cardboard will help keep weeds from sprouting. put down a few layers and hold it down with a few rocks you won't have much growing there for a year or two and when it starts getting weedy again just put down another few layers over the existing stuff. it's a pretty quick way of dealing with almost any weeds/grasses.
songbird
...
i forgot to mention it, but a lot of the clean up of that garden involved moving a lot of daffodil and crocus bulbs and other plants out of the middle section so that it is a lot easier to clear of weeds when i do need to scrape it.
now i can scrape the whole garden in 2-3 hours. i have to do some fine weeding in the thyme along the edges but i'm quite happy to do it. i get out a ground pillow and sit there and enjoy the day. once it is fully established it is a pretty good ground cover, but you do have to keep the weeds out of it since it is such a low growing plant.
the bottom part where we put the bricks in used to be a low area full of creeping jenny but it was too hard to keep weed free so we put a few layers of cardboard over it and then some weed barrier fabric so i don't have any weeds trying to come up between those bricks for a few years. there wasn't much prep work done to put those bricks down so it won't be even. we just needed a spot to put them. before i'd spend 5-10hrs to weed that bottom part by hand several times a season. i'd rather put that time into other things so now it is smothered until we decide to change it again. :)
songbird
YIKES !!!! You maintain that all by yourself!!!!
DUUUUUUDE you are the man!!!
there's two of us. one of us likes doing things the easy way and the other person does things the hard way - somehow we manage to get most things done eventually. :)
songbird
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