My first attempt at raised beds. I'm about to spank y'all's ass at some flowers, because my wife wants me to. Until my landscape timbers rot away in a few years.
Looks great @Fiveslide ! I want to see your flowers when they are popping. What are you planning to plant? I've had some successes, some fails as usual. Dill was a great one to start early. The cold nights didn't bother it and as soon as we had hot days it got huge. Chamomile was easy to grow, it has beautiful lush foliage and it's a perennial that barely goes dormant during winter. I was surprised that my calendula is a perennial. The package has it labeled as an annual. It didn't bloom until late season last year so I was attempting to start earlier this year for more blooms. The ones from last year have been blooming for a month and the plants are large with full foliage. The new baby ones got shocked at transplant but look to be making a comeback. I'm excited to use the petals for projects . My dwarf dahlias didn't survive the transplant. RIP I used garden soil infested with pillbsugs to start my tomatoes and lost half my seedlings before I got the infestation under control. Spinach, ugh. This is my third year of getting one crop of leaves before it bolts. I think I had decent luck with some special variety a few years back. If I can get more of those seeds maybe I'll try again, but otherwise I'm done with spinach. I'll be starting basil late with my tomatoes from now on. I always have a hard time transitioning it outside because our spring nights are so cold and the plants get damaged pretty badly. I picked up free strawberry plants this spring and added them to the front beds. The ones I planted in years past are loaded with immature fruit. The fruits are small but delicious. I'm going to be dressing the beds with poopy duck straw and see what I can do to improve fruit size.
I will. It's dahlias, lilies and such, I don't know any more than that. Some my wife bought online and I've already started in pots, some are being transplanted from the same area when it was ground level bed. I'm I'm sure we'll have some that won't bloom this year, because transplant or our timing, or whatever reason.
I admire your ambition. Right now my beds are 4x10 and 8” deep. Since I have to replace two of them I was thinking of making them 16”deep but it feels too much like work and I have a lot of other shit to do.
Filling them was the easy part. That soil is so fluffy and light, well worth the $42 a scoop from the local farm store. It's taking almost four heaping scoops from a Kubota farm tractor with a typical sized bucket Hardest part was building the first couple runs of timbers, getting them all level and square-ish, digging out where needed to get level. Then it was just cutting, stacking and screwing. Then lining the whole thing with landscape fabric. The section to the right is three timbers deep at the front, so ~9", and four deep further back, ~12". The middle back is ~12"-15". The raised corner beds are ~22", average depth since the back is deeper than the front.
Some lilies staring to go in. Hopefully I can get the last load of dirt picked up today before the farm store closes.
I dug a pond and built a turtle enclosure. Still need to get some stone to replace those ugly blocks and build the waterfall, and bring in some topsoil and sow some grass in that area.