Raised beds

The raised beds in front (of our house in the mountains) are looking good.

The last sugar snap peas are giving way to tomatoes and pole beans (greasy cut beans - an Southern Appalachian heirloom bean and yard-long beans - the Asian version (twining) of our southern cowpea -- but much better in my opinion.

I harvested bunches of beets, carrots, and onions from the raised beds this afternoon -- they'll be tasty roasted for tomorrow's dinner.  (And I'm thinking I need to head down to our Piedmont vegetable garden to harvest the rest of the garlic, maybe most of the onions, and check the potatoes.)

A new red potato popped up when I was checking some "leftover" plants that I'd stuck in a corner here in the mountains. What fun!

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More raised beds, lettuce, mesclun, and radishes

The two raised beds below the house turned into three, with 'leftover' stone and soil. The third is just to the right of the deck, barely visible in this photo.

The view from above.

And from below.

I tucked the rest of the leek seedlings and lettuce into one bed, and sowed mesclun mix, radishes, and arugula in another.

They're placeholder crops, and probably won't amount to much without frequent watering. There isn't rain in the forecast this week, so I hope that the rich organic soil will hold moisture well. But experiments are fun.

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Stone raised beds

Raised beds can be edged with landscape timbers, wood boards, concrete blocks, old railroad ties, brick, stone of various sorts, or nothing at all (just mounded up).

But we opted for permanence and appearance in these new beds, converted from empty 'driveway' space to growing space for vegetables, herbs, and flowers.

It was a process, but not actually all that difficult, although physically taxing (I knew I should have been spending more time lifting weights this winter!)

The sequence is hard to make accurate, as arranging images in Blogger can be quite exasperating -- but maybe I've fixed them with draft Blogger.

Hopefully, you'll get the idea.

Mocha (our gardening assistant) enjoys supervising.

And I'll have plenty of lovely 'top soil' created from vegetable compost and composted manure to nourish our summer vegetables.

We have more than enough stones (and 'soil') to create two more beds below the house.

That'll be a project for another weekend.

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Raised beds for vegetables

We'll be building new beds this weekend on some unused driveway space up in the mountains.

I know I'll be a happier gardener to be tending more vegetables and herbs, away from my main spaces, which will benefit from a break, especially the main vegetable garden, which needs to be fallow, to reduce root-knot nematodes.

But there are gardening activities here to be done, too. The major task is freeing many mulched beds from their cloak of (weedy) winter annuals. Uh, and my gardening companion has yet to get the lawn mower out; I'm not a lawn person, but what's out there is getting pretty sizeable. He's had other distractions, certainly, but hopefully he'll crank up the riding mower soon.

I'm afraid I've only mowed a lawn a couple of times in my gardening life, and that with a push gasoline-powered mower back in Statesboro, GA in our first house and garden, in the last summer there, after my gardening companion (AKA my husband Tim) had already relocated to Clemson, SC.

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