Beds and Pathways

Today's Activities

Donna and I met this morning at the garden. Donna pulled weeds and moved lots of dirt. I rototilled, Kyle and Kelsie got dirty. We all had other obligations for the day, but in an hour and a half we got a lot done. We laid out and cleared pathways and marked out and began preparing 30 planting beds.

There are two long beds, about 18' x 3' at the north and south ends of the garden. I suggest that we reserve these for asparagus and strawberries. In between, we marked out space for 28 smaller beds, each about 8x3. My children's attention spans prevented me from staying to finish, but at least we made a good start.

Things to Do

If anyone has time during the week, feel free to stop by and finish up a bed or two. I'm hoping that we can handle weeding and cultivation chores on an "adopt-a-bed" basis.

You should be able to see the pattern we laid out and continue the pathways between the beds. The idea is to take soil from the pathways and add this to the north ends of the beds. Currently the ground slopes to the north and it would be better if the ground sloped to the south to improve the solar heating of the soil and extend our growing season a bit. The tops of the beds should be raked flat and smooth, built up on the north and sloping down slightly to the south. This is pretty easy work with a square-nose shovel and an iron rake and only takes 10 or 15 minutes.

Watering

Eventually it would be wonderful to have a drip irrigation system, but for now I thought that an easy approach would be to set up a tractor type lawn sprinkler to run the length of a garden hose laid down the middle of the central path. We can set this up to run on a timer to comply with Del Norte's watering restrictions so the only work that would be required is a schedule to stop by and reset the sprinkler to the beginning of it's run.