Heart of the Garden

What’s wrong with this picture?

Answer: The deer stayed out but the weeds went crazy. I don’t know what I was thinking.

Also, those flimsy tomato cages never work. Maybe they will work for peppers or cukes but NOT TOMATOES.

We built this raised bed to keep weeds out and keep the hill from falling down.The hill behind it was overrun with multiflora rose which was awful but was good for erosion control, so I’ve tried to plant quite a bit of groundcover.

The bed is four feet wide and …really long with walking aisles along the long side. The posts are pressure treated, but that should not affect the soil because it’s on the outside of the wood. We dug down about 2 feet and backfilled it with crushed stone and jammed some cement in there because the hill is putting a lot of “hydrostatic” pressure on the walls of the bed. Me learn new big word. Sounds fancier than water pressure.

We used cypress (from a farm in Gap, PA) for the walls.

I plan to use those weird brown bricks that we got free from a local landscaping co. to make a walk on each side of the bed so the weeds don’t come back.