Heathers Mucky World: March 2015

random fun garden stuff

Look what is growing in the mulch!

And the bazillion daffodils and tulips we planted in the fall are starting to come up. Spring is fun

Deschutes trip

Taking a break to go hiking and visit one of our favorite places, The Deschutes River

Getting the berries under control

The annual process of controlling the berries begins

Step 1: remove all the old canes

(ps, you can see the raspberries in the background, I've already removed the dead stuff and tied them up)

Step 2: tie up the 1 year old canes

So far, I have put in 5 days to get this far. It's harder than it looks.

One of these year I am going to thin these berries. Ideally, we would have 1 plant every 4-6 feet. Currently, we have them every 4-6 inches. Yikes

Ther are two varieties, Cascade and Young berries according to the son of the family that used to live here. I want to separate them out because one is good eating and the other good cooking. But I know them by their leaves. so, I think this set is the Young berry. I have tagged it. I just have to remember to check if I am right.

We got 3 dump trucks of mulch delivered

My big annoyance with the berries are the thistles. and bindweed but I don't know how to kill that one.

So step 3: cardboard down between the berries

Step 4: alder leaf mulch on top of that

The mower doesn't fit between the rows, so...

Step 5: weed cloth between the rows

and step 6: Cedar chips on top to level out the path.

It looks reasonably pretty, and I really hope it helps control those dratted thistles!

I could kind of get the little mower between the raspberries, but it was a seriously bumpy ride, so we are mulching here as well

Just in time to finish, everyone is staring to leaf out!

I hope this works! it was so much work to do

Building raised beds

The real project this late winter/ spring is to build the raised beds. It has been a much harder project then I imagined. Here is the layout we came up with before starting

We then hired this young man to till the area. More for leveling purposes than loosening the soil or anything else. You can see where we removed the plywood.

Eric and I then raked it closer to level. This turned out to be a very bad idea. I threw my back out pretty bad. Note to self, raking is bad. don't rake.

In some areas we had to dig out a little bit to level it. This is at the end of the parking area on the driveway

Ive gone back and forth on the weed cloth issue. Plastic left in the ground vs weed control. We have such bad thistle and blackberries in this area I decided to go for it. Ive done the cardboard thing, I do like it, but it doesn't work as well, and I really don't want those two things in my raised beds!

When my back finally felt better, I got super sick. It was really frustrating!

Jim came down and helped Eric though, thank goodness.

The beds come as kits, but it took a little figuring before the boys had it down.

But the eventually found a system that worked and made some real progress. This bed was a custom bed for our Tetris garden. You can also see the wire mesh we put on the bottom to hopefully control for the gophers and voles that run rampant here.