New and Improved Bed

Clearly my edible adventures, while amusing, haven't been a tale of abundant sustenance throughout the glorious summer days of fresh produce.

Problem #1: I don't get enough sun.
That's only gotten worse as our loveliest (black gum) tree in the middle of the yard has gotten bigger and provided more shade.

Using twine to lay out a rough outline for placing the stones....this was
April 2022, so clearly the construction got a bit behind 😄

Problem #2: water.
Our yard is extremely sloped, so even trying to build up the dirt in the edible plot and put extra wood at the bottom to hold in water probably wasn't sufficient. It's even worse along the sidewalk where the blackberry and raspberry bushes were planted. You're talking an almost 45∘ angle drop at a few points that then slopes more gradually until it "levels out", by which I mean continues even more gradually all the way to the corner of the yard.

I had a fleeting thought about building a raised bed of sorts, but didn't get serious until our neighbor offered stones she was getting rid of in 2021.

Simaltaneously as I've gotten more into natives, I decided that being busy with 2 tiny people means I definitely have time for MORE gardening and so it's definitely time to make BIGGER wildflower beds! Yeaaaah.
So I finally decided to jump in and go go go this year!
(In all seriousness, the beauty of my new style of gardening is that you're NOT constantly weeding these pristine beds with wide open dirt/mulched spaces. Violets are your friend, my friend - embrace them!)

Since the slope is more gradual towards the fence and I wanted an access path, I started there to help determine where the wall needed to actually start...

Ok, digging sod absolutely sucks, can we all just agree on that?! I don't understand why it takes so long or feels so hard, but it just kills me every time how exhausting it is to remove the tiniest portion! [end rant]

I put down one stone and then planted violets I have all over the yard to keep the dirt from washing away until I plant more of a variety.

A few weeks later I started on the wall!

That was held up by needing to get a drain pipe extension, but once we got that I took another Saturday, spent most of the day doing working, and finished with just a few paving stones to spare!

The next week I was able to pull out the last bit of grass from the bed and fill in when we bought more bags of soil and voila!

Toddler absolutely loved the building process because she had "stairs". Though that went away when I finished it, she's still quite enamored with her little trail she seems sure was created as a thoroughfare just for her.

I was able to finish my last few stepping stones soon after and had plenty of violets to spare after redoing the original edible bed (that's coming next!)

And then the flowers came into bloom and oooohhhh, just lovely!

I just really love how it turned out and can't wait to widen the wildflower border more next year, because how beautiful is all this?!

I was nervous about transplanting my strawberries at the end of June because it had gotten very hot, but they did absolutely wonderful and in fact ended up putting out blooms. I'm thinking, 'ummm...it's not possible that that means....' Yup! Sure enough! We got a few random strawberries! They are loving their new home!

I moved my hardy kale over there since our blackberry bush sadly bit the dust. We'll likely get another next year.
And our raspberries?

My Dad-in-law takes one look at it and goes, "uuuhhh, hate to tell you, but that's not a raspberry bush."
Well that's what the tag said!
Verdict once they popped....wineberries. This is why you don't buy plants from Lowe's 🤦

Oh well, the girls love them, and while sister thinks she now has a retaining wall freeway, baby seems to think she has a built-in buffet counter. Feet on the ground she can pull herself up holding onto the retaining wall and magic! Berries are right at the height of her face! She'd cleaned off an entire branch before we realized it. 😄

Two of the dahlia bulbs I planted the previous year came back up...

While I'm not loving having this wide open dirt space to weed, I'm looking forward to seeing how the peas do there next year and a few other things I'll try out. Yay for the one place in my backyard that gets more than 3 hours of sun! And now it can hold water!
I'll mulch it and try to get more of my creeping thyme to grow there to help cut down on weeds as well. So here we go on our abundant summer crops! In my 2-3' x 8' bed 😜

And I now have piles of sod all over my yard...I'm trying to get rid of grass in favor of more environmentally friendly options, so where am I going to put it?! There's currently a stack behind my shed and I basically carpeted the entire under the deck stairs space to keep cats from using it as their litter box 😑 I filled in some bare spots and otherwise will probably just dry it out and chuck it.

"But wait - what about your original edible bed" you ask?

More on that next time 😁