Digging New Beds 2

Since my last post, I have removed the sod from the area for the first bed. I drove in stakes to mark the corners of the bed and pulled string around the stakes to out line the bed.

Here I have dug the first trench in the double digging process.

 The soil was shoveled into my lawn cart until I need it to fill in the final trench at the other end of the bed. Digging for a few hours each day, it took two days to complete the digging. I was quite surprised at how tightly packed the subsoil was. It took more force than I thought it would to get the fork in to its full depth, so that I could fluff that layer. After digging I used a hard tine rake to smooth it off.

This bed is 4 feet wide and 25 feet long for a total of 100 square feet of growing space.

 You might be able to see here that it created a raised bed about 4 inches high.

After smoothing the bed I topped it off with a layer of partially decomposed leaves and twigs, that I had from my last wood chip delivery. It does have some small wood chips mixed in, but it is the only organic matter that I have. With our warmer weather, the leaves have stopped falling so I'm just using what I have available.

I dug this into the soil in the hopes that it will decompose by March, when I will be planting my spring garden. I finished all of this up yesterday at about 4:30. At this point I was pretty much exhausted, so I will continue this in my next post. Then I will show how I do the paths around the bed.



Soooo......Until next time......HAPPY GARDENING!