We came a long way last summer. The first beds didn’t go in until mid June when we finished helping with the heavy earth moving and such over at the 62nd Street Garden.
Our first weekend we put in three raised bed frames. They aren’t all that raised and we didn’t do much to the help the rocky/sandy soil thick with crab grass, but our main goal at that point was just to get something in.
Here are those first three beds, along with a big hunk of concrete we've rigged up as a kind of bench.
Over the next couple of months we added some more informal beds surrounded by the rocks we were digging up in the lot.
Here we planted some lupine, moss roses, lamb's ears, and a cone flower
Our next endeavor was to try to mulch the spaces between the beds with chips from a woodchip pile in the back of the lot. It looks pretty good in the photos below, but by spring 2011 it’s pretty clear that those woodchips were a bit too close to being compost to be a good long-lasting mulch. The newspaper we put under them has held up better.
Things really started blooming in early August. Those Marigolds pushed on into October
That just about brings things to the end of the 2010 growing season. We learned a bunch (like you really need to cut the sod out of an area you don’t want the grass to come back in, and what a mattock and pick axe are really for—you wouldn’t believe some of the rocks and bricks and things we’ve dug up so far!). With any luck I should be able to get a post up about 2011 so far. Stay tuned …
Flowers for Kimbark 