No standing puddles of water.

how do you keep the weeds out of your beds? and also how do you cut the grass between those? it looks beautiful

I walk through the garden three or four times a day, on average. Whenever I walk through the garden, I pull a few weeds here and there. Keeps 'em more or less under control. About once or twice a month, when the weeds start to get ahead of me, I get the hula hoe and spend half an hour or so working things over. If things don't dry out for a couple of days, the weeds ARE gonna stage a coup d'etat. (About 4 AM, the garden looked like a swimming pool.)

Mowing? Yeah. PITA. I also use a line trimmer to keep things trimmed up. The original plan is to replace the sod with edible ground covers. That's scheduled for a couple or three years from now. That, or when I get tired of mowing it, which ever comes first.

edited to note: It only takes about five minutes to mow our front garden and another five to ten minutes to run the lline trimmer. But mowing it? Yeah, it's a bit tricky. Gotta watch yer toes on this one.

This post was edited by wbonesteel on Thu, Jun 6, 13 at 14:25

And here I thought I was the only one to use PITA!
I luv the look! Couple of questions:
1. How do you remove leaves from yur paths?
2. What sort of "stuff" do you have under the paths?
LuvaBasil

For cleaning the paths, I use a rake. We've got a pretty steady breeze, here. The wind takes care of most it, really.

The paths were dug eight inches deep. The bottom was covered with landscape cloth, which was covered with approx four inches of builder's sand with another layer of landscape cloth on that, and then three to four inches of gravel to top it all off. It's really an ad hoc dry well, with a total volume of around 8 cubic yards. Lots of room for water to filter in through the gravel and sand.

Beautiful layout....but what in the world is PITA? I've not heard of this...

Sharon

Sharon, You will laugh....it stands for Pain In The Ass. : ) Or, for foodies, I guess we could say it stands for pita bread.

I think both mowing and edging with the string trimmers are a major PITA but also a necessary evil.

Dawn

Do you use drip irrigation?

As for irrigation, on our budget, we plan to use sprinkler and soaker hoses, in time. If I can find the parts at the right prices, I'd use a drip irrgation set up for most of it. With the big bucks, we'd be talking about 1/2 inch pvc, risers and specific types of heads where we needed them.

For now, we use a hose and wand, sometimes a hose and oscillating sprinlker. I think of it as being better than using a bucket and a can...

Normally, when needed, we water the plants and un-mulched beds about every other day, and then water the whole thing mebbe once a week. The mulched beds only get watered when they need it, or when individual plants in them need a drink. Compared to the last couple of years, I haven't had to water hardly at all this year.

This post was edited by wbonesteel on Thu, Jun 6, 13 at 17:09

Very, very nice! Personally, I like to use my wand and hose. I can get up close and personal with my plants, and nip any small issues that have potential to become larger issues, in the bud. It's like taking care of your complexion before you end up at the dermatologist' s. I can linger and enjoy the sights and smells, too. If I can't take time to do the small things, it's no longer a labor of love, but a PITA as you so aptly put it, lol!

Susan

Exactly, Susan.

When I'm watering with a wand, I see things and say, 'That can wait until tomorrow" or "I'll schedule 'this' for Tuesday, mebbe Wednesday." and, my favorite..."Oh, shoot. I gotta deal with 'that' as soon as I put the hose away." Next thing ya know, people think you've got a green thumb or sumpin'. Little do they know how much more we've got to learn, eh? :)

When you linger a bit, you also notice little scenes like this...

I love your garden more every time I see it. Beautiful !
kim

Thanks, Kim! I appreciate it.

The design will work in a larger space. Make sure you give yourself more room to mow the grass than I did. Our garden is only sixty-three feet long and thirty-three feet wide.

The real secret wrt the lack of space for mowing in our garden... is... that I made a mistake, and used the second draft when I laid it out and started digging...instead of using the final draft. The differences, on paper, were relatively minor. In practice it was a mistake of three feet in the total width of the garden. By the time I noticed the mistake, it was much too late in the process and I didn't want to start over.

That mistake gave us most of the long bed, where the glads and blazing stars currently live. In time, that same long bed will have goji berries and honeyberries with perennial veggies as border plantings. Lemons, Lemonade, that sort of thing.

You wouldn't believe how much dirt I re-arranged in that garden...or how many times I turned the beds over with a shovel, mixing in amendments and such. A young man using cash money could've done it all (with the same tools) in a matter of two or three weeks. It took me almost a year and a half. I ain't a young man. My point being, that anyone -if they really wanted to, or needed to do so- can install a design like that, if they can plan ahead and measure things a bit.

(Edit: Now that I think about it, it took me the best part of two years to get to this point, which is a bit more than a year and a half...)

This post was edited by wbonesteel on Sat, Jun 8, 13 at 0:24