Plans for the planting in Autumn. I am about to pull out my tomatoes, and the two end beds are now planted completely. I plan on planting my garlic when March hits officially and having a whole bed of green manure. I don’t know how much I will get done before I go away in the middle of March, but maybe a bit.
So since the last post, a few things happened.
The new house we chose for a few reasons. The layout was better, the house smaller and the space in the yard larger. I knew that I would have a great amount of space to grow a vege garden. Proper, large, cyclic, fantastic. The front yard we have is fenced in and gets full sun all year round. The perfect spot for a vege patch. The layout is rectangular and has this figure 8 in the middle done with a concrete edging. So initially the idea was to dig out the figure 8 and put a walking path in the middle and grow in there.
So we started digging it out and found large roots through it, even though it was all grass it looks like it housed some large trees that were just removed and stumped. But it also gave us an idea just how hard it would be to dig up, and an idea of the space, which seemed to waste all that fantastic room. My goal is to sustain our fresh vegetable needs all year round. I live in Queensland, sub tropics which means this should be possible. I WANT to eat and use seasonal produce and I WANT to grow heirlooms.
So in the end we found that the figure 8 would actually be a waste of the full potential of the space, and due to the root system we would actually be better building raised beds. So that is where we are right now. We are going to level the area, dig up the concrete edging and put in raised beds.
The design is really simple. 6 3x1m beds 0.4m high. I did some research on what to build it from, and there were many options but we ended up going with untreated hardwood that is naturally resistant to termites. Its really heavy, and average cost for what we received and the amount of wood needed.
Last weekend we spent measuring, cutting, routing, drilling and moving a tonne of hardwood sleepers. This weekend we get a digger in to level the front yard and finish prepping the wood to build the beds. It is starting to get really exciting.
Of course I have to end with some gratuitous dog photos. They helped both weekends.
