Paths Between Beds

Okay! Here are some photos of my garden showing the grass main isles plus the paving stones between beds and concrete blocks to get containers off the ground. The blocks allow the grass to easily be controlled with a string trimmer. The paving stones between the beds prevent constant mud from forming.







Ted

[janezee]

That's just so pretty, ted!

[Rockporter]

Originally Posted by janezee

That's just so pretty, ted!

I agree and it is so deserving of a nice looking path between the beds.

Thank you! My daughter had not seen it for a couple of weeks. This past weekend, she said she feels she is walking in a jungle. I do plant thick and grow everything up. Many of my 42 tomato varieties will reach 10' in height. By June, many of the 600 onions I planted will average about softball size. We have been eating five varieties of lettuce since late February and with the early warm temps, it will probably bolt soon.

The annual rye grass will also soon die in the heat, but Bermuda grass is already growing beneath it. I rarely have a problem with the Bermuda growing up under the beds since I keep it away from the beds with a string trimmer. Since I mow it regularly, it also doesn't get a chance to form seed heads.

Ted

[Tracydr]

Ted, that is so nice. I'm amazed that you can grow so much in such a small area and with such small containers!

Tracy,

I've always grown that way in raised beds and containers. I don't like to have wasted space. The largest container is probably five gallons, but it only has three gallons of soil in it. It only works because the containers have drip irrigation and slow release fertilizer. The containers never receive enough water to run out the bottom, but they also never dry out. The last four containers at the far end of the line are my dwarf varieties and they are covered with blooms. I will probably add more pots next year for more dwarfs.

Ted

[zabby17]

Ted,

Do you know, your statement about "Have you ever felt a compost bin owns you instead of your owning it?" made me chuckle because sometimes I feel a bit that way about my whole garden. It's something I actually have pondered quite seriously, and years ago, about my third year of gardening, once when I was having a really crazy spring and not getting to some of the gardening tasks I'd enjoyed the previous few years, I made a vow: Remember that the garden is here to comfort YOU, not the other way around! My tomato plants are not ACTUALLY my babies, and the worst that happens if I neglect them is that I have to buy tomatoes from someone else who did have time to grow them properly that year. I do occasionally get the guilts and have to shake myself with that reminder. I'm thinking of having it cross-stitched!

But as for the compost---Jane, Never be afraid of the compost! The compost is your FRIEND!

Here are Aunt Zabby's compost quick hints, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Compost:

-- Use bins. They are more APPROACHABLE somehow than piles, and will make sure you don't get a pile so big that turning it is daunting.

-- Get several. You need at least two, so that when one is full you can let it sit and "cook" while you fill the other. (That said, those pictures you see on some composting sites of a three-section bin where one is being added to, one is sitting, and one has compost spilling out of it that you can be taking from, are SO bogus. Nobody has compost sitting there waiting for you to take it! As soon as it's ready, there's somewhere it could go in the garden.)

-- Keep a pile of good browns nearby (at least, if you compost a lot of kitchen scraps). Kitchen scraps tend to be "greens" on the wet side, A garbage can full of leaves, say, or straw, or wood shavings---whatever you have that is free. Add a few handfuls whenever you add a big bucket of greens. Keeps it from getting stinky and slimy.

-- Wear gloves with rubber palms. Compost is damp stuff, but it's not actually more gross than any other dirt-related task most of the time. Good gloves take away the final fear of Ick.

That's all! My first foray into composting, with a green cone in the city, was a bust---it was ALWAYS full and ALWAYS gross. Learning those few little things has made me a veritable composting enthusiast. I mean, you can MAKE DIRT---how cool is that? Not just any dirt, but the BEST dirt!

Nothing in your list is a problem for cold composting, Jane: "Mealy apples, eggshells, moldy carrots, broccoli stalks the size of my wrist, lots of pea vines, pine needles and cones, and weeds, and crabshells." It'll all go in time. The pine cones may be the slowest. I do try to avoid, say, STICKS the size of my wrist. Thick BROWNS are the slowest to decompose, so I have a separate "brush pile" that just gets left totally alone for brambles, twigs, etc.

But everything else will go.

I say, leave your piles, get a bin, and start using it. When it's full, get a new bin, and turn your old pile---just shovel it INTO your bin, breaking up the biggest clumps while you are at it. It'll probably heat up for a bit if you do that, but if you want to be sure, add some nice, small greens---coffee grounds, or a bin of old lettuce from the produce dept, or grass clippings.

I bet by the time you have shovelled off enough to fill your bin, you'll be down to some good stuff underneath that is done or almost done! If it isn't ready, fill another bin with it the same way.

You have to look around to get bins for cheap, but it's do-able. Some municipalities sell them at a discount. Our local Stewardship council just had a sale of them for $35. And I've gotten several for free from friends who tried composting, then couldn't bothered, esp. as Toronto started collecting compostables at the municipal level.

But if I haven't inspired you, then---yes, I'll come turn your compost! Both of them! If you'll come help mulch my paths. It's the laying down cardboard that seems like way more work than it should be. Sigh....

Zabby

[zabby17]

hornstrider,
Your path is a thing of beauty! Looks like walking into a tomato cathedral.

I'm not quite ready for the commitment that crushed granite or other stone would be (what if I move the paths next year?) but one day....

Z

[zabby17]

So I decided to go with cardboard and wood chips. I think I really need something under the wood chips to suppress the weeds, which are already rampant on some of the paths, before the lack of light really kills them, and I don't like the idea of something non-biogdegradable under there that eventually I'll have to deal with.

I got a good source of free wood chips, finally! I think I wrote about this in my thread about plants in the ground, but we're having some large tree limbs taken down and the tree guys will chip the limbs and leave the chips behind---in a pile right by the garden! They already left me a load from someone else's trees that they had with them when they came by the other day.

My brother helped me get a start, around the back beds with the worst weeds, yesterday. We ran out of time and cardboard before we ran out of chips. I'm gonna need a lot of cardboard!

I'm hoping that, in the future, I can renew the chips every spring BEFORE the weeds get through, and won't have to worry about cardboard again.

Probably the most valuable thing I'm getting out of this whole tree-trimming operation is the phone number of the tree guy, who will be happy to bring me more chips when I need them!

Thanks, everyone, for your advice and suggestions. I love hearing about everyone's garden solutions!

Z