The outdoor container garden is doing great! It is now so populated I cannot fit it all in one shot in my camera.
Since the radishes are coming along nicely in the radish-and-carrot containers, I went ahead and planted 2 more of the same. According to the pkgs I should start more every few weeks in order to have harvest all summer. Also new in this picture are the basil, thyme, and chocolate mint (!!!) plants from the plant sale, celery and sage from counter rootings, and a last straggling bucket of sprouted red CSA potatoes.
More stuff. The last of the sprouted green onions (from CSA yellow onions) are planted as well and we've eaten the last of the frozen CSA veggies from last year, so we are all ready for this year's shipments to start arriving! Alas, they won't for a few weeks yet. A couple of the more thick and robust green (yellow) onions have started to flower. I don't know if they'll all do this or just some. I need to look up more about propagating onions :) I am not sure if this means I get to eat them next year, or 2 years from now. We'll see!
As previously reported, the retaining wall for the raised bed for our new blueberry bushes was delayed by several days. What happened was, back on Monday I phoned up Carlson Building Materials and asked if they had 10' landscaping timbers. "Oh," they replied, "those are 8 footers". OK! So my Spouse and I hopped in the big truck and drove down there, paid for 16 of the 8' timbers plus 2 pieces of 1/2" rebar and a cutoff wheel, and they took our money. It was only after we drove the truck around into the treated lumber gate of the yard that it was discovered they had no landscaping timbers in stock.
Back at the main desk up front, they were wringing their hands as I walked in to get my money back. "The computer says there are 240 in stock!" they explained. As it happens, the guy in line ahead of me was also doing something to do with out of stock items, for which he was receiving substitutes. They really wanted me to wait for the timbers to come in, instead of getting a refund, so I told them I'd leave my order intact if they'd deliver them for free on Wednesday when they promised their back order of 240 timbers would arrive. "Thursday at the latest," was their story. The days passed... apparently the timbers were being trucked in from Duluth but kept not being on the truck. Meanwhile the Bushes sit all forlorn with dead leaves packed around their bare roots, being watered twice a day.
But on Friday they arrived and we got to work. Here's a picture of the timbers, cut to size, all laid out in readiness to be put on in tiers. They are surrounding the 6" deep bed we cleared and dug several days ago. They're 3"x4" timbers so at four layers tall this wall will raise the bed up 12" up off the surrounding ground.
All I knew going into this project was that the landscaping timbers were are cheapest available bet for building retaining walls, at least at this time and on a strictly temporary basis. Oh yes, based on the experiences and advice of my friend
Debbie Bibb of Running D Ranch, I knew that using rebar to tie the pieces together was important for strength and stability even on a much lower wall than this. I did some research and found a pretty good set of general instructions on the web titled "
How to Build a Cheap Decorative Retaining Wall Out Of Landscaping Timber", by Agnes Farside. After a lot of head scratching I created the above drawing, which allowed me to calculate how much landscaping timber and rebar to buy.
One thing we did do differently was that my Spouse felt (again, from personal experience) it'd be easier to stack all four tiers at once, then drill through with a very long drill bit than to put the layers on one at a time as Ms. Farside suggested. Also since we had a four-corner bin rather than a wall on a hillside as they did, we decided not to put on the corner brackets. The thing was incredibly tight and sturdy when it was finished as-was.
The holes are 1/2" in size which is the size of the rebar minus its protruding ribs. This made the holes tight enough that the rebar had to be pounded in with a sledge hammer. For most of the beginning I was employed to sit on the frame to keep the timbers still during the drilling and hammering. Ladies, I highly recommend this enjoyable experience and would definitely do it again.
One end result of this was that we ran all the rods all the way through, instead of having them staggered as shown in the drawing. This meant that there were far more rebar ends showing on top than I'd planned on. I was a little concerned that the rebar would poke out and scratch people -- this being mainly due to recollections of my childhood days playing on city playgrounds in Minneapolis. However, it turns out that the wood is much more springy than the metal of the bar, so the bars could magically be recessed simply by pounding with a big sledge a few extra times. I learn something new every day!
Here's what it looked like more-or-less completed. The next step (it will have to be a project for another day though) is to remove the loose 8-10" of dirt from inside, and mix that with peat moss, sand, dry leaves, and sulfur and install the Bushes in their new home! As a note, that's the new Liberty Elm tree lit up in the background. On the right is what I call the "south garden" of the house.
Here's another shot of the completed wall. It sure looks nice -- it is too bad walls like this don't last long. Well, hopefully it will last long enough for me to save up for a real wall :)
That south garden is finally coming into its own. I think I mentioned before that the majority of the veronicas and purple coneflowers I planted last year have survived the winter and are coming in nice and healthy. I did have to replace a few coneflowers (not shown, but they look like bare spots that break the alternating pattern) and have not quite had luck with that yet. First I planted some storebought purple coneflower seeds indoors but they did not germinate. Now I have planted the remaining storebought seeds directly in the ground where the missing plants were. If that does not work, I have one more thing I can try: planting seeds harvested from last year's coneflowers blossoms. If those don't grow either, hopefully by then Walmart will have coneflowers plants in stock again. I have been checking but they don't have any yet.
I left a 24" lane between the retaining wall and the place where the south garden wraps around the corner of the house. This was partly to set a precedent because I want to have lanes like this between all my raised beds in the future; partly to give better access to the blueberries on all sides for picking; partly to preserve that south bed instead of overshadowing it too badly; and partly to make it easier to maintain. 24" was calculated to allow the lawnmower to get in there fully.
Once the new wall was done my Spouse cut off the pointy end of the old previously existing 4" x 5" landscaping timber that had been lying alongside the deck, so that I could replace it in the corner to finish off that space. Of course, now that we have this new wall the decrepitude of our existing landscaping becomes painfully apparent. I foresee a re-do of that south garden timber border in my rather near future!
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