You all inspired me to do some beautification in my veg garden
When I planned these beds I spaced them far enough apart to get my lawn tractor in-between them, but getting between them and the fence involved my weed whacker. As anyone with a fence has found out, maintaining the grass at the base of a fence is a pain.
I'm 3/4 of the way done with the edging. It's 10" tall with something like 6" or 7" of it buried. It does a good job of keeping grass out of our other beds, so I'm sure it will do a good job here. The downside is the most effective way of installing it is to trench first, put the edging in, and then refill the trench. If you try to use one of those big pizza peel looking things to make a narrow slide the will usually get wavy due to variation in trench depth.
I mowed to basically ground height between the beds, weed whacked around the beds, and put in a layer of that thick paper builders will use to protect flooring below the mulch. Some areas for cardboard instead, but we just didn't have enough cardboard to cover it all. Hopefully it will be enough to kill the grass and hopefully that results in less grass appearing in my raised beds.
Thanks! I don't know about professional, but it should be pretty practical.
I thought about stone, but it's too permanent. We have crushed marble (that white stuff) in some of our flower beds from the previous owner and it's a pain. If we wanted to get rid of it we would have to pay someone to take it away.
We might expand for more beds once our kids outgrow their play structure. We have four 4x8 beds and grow vertically, so we have a decent amount of space. This year we have beans, peas, cucumber, cantaloupe, trombetta, pie pumpkins, shallots, onions, carrots, tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, and lufa for fun.
Looks great! I’ve gotta live vicariously through other growmies posts for a week still. Steroid shots are next week than I should be able to get some more done.
Is that the same custom printed speaker I saw a post about last week or so?
Trying to hold on until my surgery, steroid shots are so I don’t need to rely on pain killers, but they come with their own complications. Trying to find the right pacing in the mean time, but I hate not doing something if there’s stuff to do. It’s a struggle.
I’ve seriously contemplated getting one, so many things I could make and use, but I also wouldn’t have the time, that would probably be a winter only type of thing. But once it’s setup and I’m comfortable, obviously wouldn’t be hard to quickly set something up or tinker with files in bed on a tablet as well. But than that would flare up the carpal tunnel anyways, so waiting until after the surgeries before even testing that water haha.
I'm feeling a little called out right now. I have a similarly chicken proof raised bed area. The grass grows taller than the plants and I have to get in and mow it. One day I found some 1x2 ft tiles on a curb. I have to put those down to kind of help control the grass but it's not helping. I feel like I need to gravel the whole area because we get so much water.
This fence has been in place for at least four years, so this has been a very long time coming. I went with mulch because getting rid of rocks is really annoying should we want to change the area again in 5-10 years.
Your hard work paid off, these look really nice! I have a U shaped garden and used stone pavers to make the path in the middle, but the grass is still growing in between. Maybe I’ll plan to switch to mulch.
Thanks! For either mulch or pavers you're going to have some level of maintenance. My personal take is that the maintenance for mulch is more frequent, but less intensive, than pavers. Both will benefit from a boarder to keep roots out.