After many, many hours of weeding and mulching, the garden is ready for planting!
Some extra hands joined us two weeks ago to weed, paper, add rabbit litter, and then mulch the second third of the garden. We’ll plant the front section first, and then wait a few weeks before planting the second section. By that point, much of the paper will have broken down.
We had so many wormy friends, I just hope that pulling up all of the soil didn’t mean a smörgåsbord for the birds.
Then a quick mow in the back where the sitting area will be and we added a few wheel barrows of leaf mulch back there, too. Hopefully we’ll just have to mow/weed whack it to keep the grass and weeds down, but we’ll use the whole space as a border from the grass outside the fence. We’ll add some plastic edging between the back and middle sections to try to keep the grass and weeds out of the main area, but we’ll still have to keep an eye on that front part. Just before the back section, we have some strawberries, a blueberry bush and a raspberry bush. Yay fruit!
Monday evening we headed out to pick up some supplies. Siggy joined us to pick up 16″ pavers for the center path (HEAVY), some veggie and wildflower seeds, plastic edging, buckets and potting mix for potatoes, and a few other bits and pieces. He was very helpful.
We raked out a bit of the mulch to level the ground and then laid the paving stones. They will hopefully eventually settle into the soil here so they’re flush with the ground, but I don’t think they’ll shift too much. The path creates a nice visual point for the garden and makes a safe walkway so we can avoid walking on the soil when not working in the beds. We’ll need to pick up a few more pavers to complete the path, as our initial measurements weren’t so exact…oops.
We also had a visit from my friend Becky, a VCE Master Gardener and fellow FOUA board member. She suggested we remove the white mulberry that is actually invasive in our area, so we got on that and hacked away at the roots. At the bottom of this photo is where the strawberries live. We were excited to discover them (they’re starting to bloom and have teeny berries right now) and also the blueberries in the bottom right corner.
Here is the finished garden, ready for planting next weekend! We’ll use some of the seeds we picked up, and I started cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplant, and sunflowers that we’ll move in about 2-3 more weeks.
Later that evening, I did a little time traveling and had a look at our future garden. I’m quite pleased with our progress.
Roof Garden Gal 