Muddy Boots – garden beds

Well, that was an awesome but tiring weekend. We got a lot accomplished, and we couldn’t be happier with the results.

I started a off a few weeks ago with ordering 4 cord of 8 foot juniper logs. They got delivered on Thursday

Then I ordered a load of compost soil that came in Friday.

I also reserved a big tiller from the local building store for the weekend and the rest was sweat and muscles.

Gathered and burned the stalks from last years garden, gathered up all the used straw that will get used again this year. Then started the task of digging up the asparagus roots, berry bushes and rhubarb plants to put them in their final resting place.

We started over 20 asparagus seeds 9 years ago and put them out in the garden. Never in my wildest imagination did I ever think they would have the enormous root balls they had. The original plan was to dig up all the roots and move them to 2 newly made beds, well that didn’t happen after a few hours of digging with a shovel and pitch fork I finally was able to dig up 12 roots.. WOW, that was exhausting. That was only 1/8 of the way through the asparagus beds.. just check out the maze of roots

So 12 roots are now in their final resting place, and there are far more than 20 other roots left in the beds. We have left them where they are for now as that is quite the task of digging, untangling, and removing from the current beds… we will have to find a new permanent area for the rest… what a start to Saturday.

We broke for lunch and then got right back at it. The next task was to get the rest of the beds made in the small garden next to the greenhouse. Man those logs were heavy, but we did it got them all in place, secured the logs and filled them with composted soil all ready for day 2…. I think we are gonna sleep well tonight.

Day 2, first task of the day move the rhubarb, gooseberries, currents and blueberry bushes.

The rhubarb roots were another struggle but not as difficult as the asparagus. It is two years in a row now that we dug up and moved the rhubarb. Hopefully, they will be okay with the disruption. We couldn’t believe in just one year how they rooted. Unbelievable, really, as with all the digging last year and the 3 shovels we broke just to get them out of the front yard, we thought we killed them last year. Hopefully, now that they are in some awesome composted soil and they are in their final place, they will thrive once again and give us amazing rhubarb for desserts

So after the rhubarb, we did the berry bushes. That was so much easier. We replanted 8 blueberry bushes, with 2 honey berry or haskhap berries, the 3 gooseberries, and 2 red currents plus 1 new black current bush. They all look so happy.

So after the berries were planted, Rusty was back at a few rounds of tilling in the big garden and the tilling of the old berry beds. Oh yes, I can’t forget the horse radish got a bucket of them out of the garden and need to plant that somewhere…. I dug up 6 of my strawberry plants left over from the ravenous critters… they are in pots to keep safe until I find a new spot for them…. I then went over to the sunchoke bed as they needed to be dug up and replanted elsewhere….

Wow, were they ever prolific in this bed…. I dug up a half gallon pail last year, not expecting much to come.. boy, that was an understatement… this is not even half of the bed harvested.. WOW.

So after this, I decided that since the soil in this bed was very loose, I wouldn’t harvest much more, but that we would work on the beds for this big garden.

So after laying the foundation for 3 of the north-south beds, we laid out the string for the east-west beds and got the end logs in place. We cut a few logs and brought them over for stacking and decided that was it, no more energy to do more.

We got so much done, and I am very proud of where we are at. All we have to do now is get the rest of the logs down for the 27 beds. Then start planting, and things should be good for this year. Once the back gardens are tilled, then we can work out back there, but for now, this is an amazing start to the 2023 gardening season with permanent raised beds♡

Hope that you enjoyed our journey this past weekend. Please like, comment and share a link to this post♡.

Stay tuned for the next post of the completion and planting♡