What Happened Since Last Time
Remember how I said I would add a section to give updates? Well, I kept adding and adding to the post I had on something else, that I realized I just needed a general update post. I'm amazed at what we have done in the last five days.
Raised Garden Beds
One of the more noteworthy things is that we decided to put together a couple of raised garden beds for vegetables.
We bought 1x10 cedar planks, and used Master Mark raised bed starters we got at Menard's. You need two starter kits to do such a tall bed. It will take more than a cubic yard of garden soil to fill both beds.
We put them in the "courtyard," the section of yard between the back porch and the detached garage. It gets a lot of sun in the summer, and my wife prefers to have her tomato plants there; so it made sense to consider putting the rest of her vegetables there, as well.
Weeding
Actually had help from my college-aged son in weeding out part of my central bed. He said I couldn't trust him to know a weed from something I wanted to keep, so I marked off an area, pointed to two good-sized swamp milkweed plants, and said, "Remove everything but these." He did about half of it before lunchtime, filling a five-gallon bucket, which helped a lot:
I was able to do more a couple days later, and continued into my grassland section:
I also got to work on weeding the Herb and Mercury 7 sections, and found that I did have a couple of Butterfly Weed plants that survived, after all. Here's one, you can see how much work still needs to be done (ignore the Fleabane on the left):
I think they might be from seed, but I need to rework the soil in that area, and reposition new plants, anyway. I'll be able to trade away some Cilantro and Black-Eyed Susans if anyone wants them! Contact me if you are in the Twin Cities area and are interested. Free to good home!
The Mulch Fairy Arrived!
We got our four-plus cubic yards of mulch delivered from Kern Landscape Resources. This is a picture after we'd been using it for a while:
The mulch was laid over some cardboard and cut-flat paper bags in the West bed, where acidic-soil-loving plants are put:
Right now, there are four Winterberry Hollies there, but a lot of weeds have been growing in the bare area that used to be under the huge Colorado Blue Spruce that once stood there. The idea of mulching it is to keep down the weeds, kill any grass, and see about planting things next year. We will see how this turns out! Here's the progress when we ran out of cardboard and newspaper:
What's Next?
We need to get more cardboard or newspaper so we can finish mulching the West bed. This is kind of important, because then we can open the driveway to accept our raised-bed garden soil blend on Wednesday!
Next is the Mercury 7 section of the Central bed; this is where I planted my first perennials. It looks like the Large-Flowered Beardtongue didn't come back, so I may move the Butterfly Weed plants there.
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