Glorious Summer: New Raised Beds and Harvest

It has been a glorious and productive three day weekend. It's been steaming hot (about 90 degrees and humid) and sunny. I'm just back from a short bike ride. The suburban homes are quiet outside as most people seem to be huddled in their air conditioning. (They're missing out, in my humble opinion.) There is not a cloud in the sky. The breeze is barely moving. When you ride you whiz through shadows that provide a minute of cool, and all sorts of different summer smells waft through the air. Heat waves rise from the road. Yellow flowers wave in the ditches.

Friday started with a drive to collect lumber, followed  by a short run, followed by assembly of two 4x4 raised beds made with 2x6 boards and 4x4 posts rising 24" from the bed. 

We envisioned the Lower Garden as all raised beds - three on a North/South axis and a fourth & fifth on an East/West line because of the tree and its roots. 

Money was thin in the spring, what with the expenses of moving into a new house, so we dug the beds, but didn't enclose them.

We spent most of the space on our ill-fated "three-sisters" planting, most of which we've removed. 

This has left the space looking markedly less inviting that we might have hoped. 

Before - when the space was markedly less inviting than we'd hoped

After - Almost after. One more bed to build, but improved

Like most jobs around the house, this one is going to cost about 2x as much and take 3x as much time as estimated. 

I'd thought that the long bed that we dug across the top of the Lower Garden was mostly flat. (It is the flattest part of the yard.) So, I purchased enough lumber to build three 4x4 boxes and attach them to 24" high 4x4 posts. I would then dig them slightly into the slope to make them level. 

Unfortunately, it is not for nothing that we have named the place "Steepmeadow." I started digging down, waiting for the first box to level...and I kept digging...and I kept digging, until the box was wholly buried at the back and not raised at all. 

This first box (the furthest from the camera and closest to the fence in the photo above) is distinguished by having one of the last, forlorn squash growing from it. The vine extends far into the middle bed below, where a lone fruit is dangling midair, supported by two dead and useless corn stalks. So I had to work around that, with sweat dripping into my glasses.

As I looked up the slope (which Kiki estimated as being about 30 degrees) to the next box, I knew that we were in trouble. We'd have to make the posts taller, and we'd have to dig into the slope and use at least two layers of boards to make the bed level from front to back.

So, we only had enough lumber for two. We needed to use quite a bit more of the 4x4 we'd intended to cut into 4 pieces in order to raise the bed to level, and add a second layer of boards to account for the hill. Still, better to do two beds right than three that look crummy. There are standards to uphold. We didn't get where we are today by slobbing about doing a half-way job.

The second box is enclosing one of the blueberry bushes we planted in the spring. Not sure what we'll do with that yet. The time to transplant (which may involve simply raising the shrub up by 6" in fresh topsoil) is apparently late winter/early fall.

In any case, I was unable to finish the job in one go, and had to leave some of it until Saturday morning, when I placed three last boards into the slope and added two 2x2 stakes to brace them in place at the 24" mark. 

I did this after this week's long run - 11 miles in the steamy humidity. Lovely, but hot work, leaving me temporarily enervated. 

Still - by Saturday afternoon, the job was complete (if you mark it by the scaled back two-bed goal). 

Harvest

Watermelon and Last of the Dragon Carrots

These watermelons have seeds!

We actually harvested one of the watermelons. It is delicious. There are three more on the vine. 

It was weird to get a watermelon that had seeds in it. This is a plus, in that we're now drying some of them to plant next year. 

For dinner, we roasted the pumpkin that we harvested yesterday. This was no "I guess we have to try to eat this" thing. It was tasty with butter and salt. Next time, some hot Italian Beyond Meat sausage roasted in it, we think. 

All things considered, it's been a fantastic weekend. 

At this point, the only thing left to do is to practice some guitar. That Ratt is not going to come together without quite a bit more work.