Dive Right In

One of my projects for the past several weeks has been the installation of the garden beds out front, which you can see in one of my earlier posts. In addition to those beds I also constructed to 9' x 14' triangle beds which will anchor the (eventual) back patio. Now that the one walnut tree has been removed, this area gets sun for most of the day, making it an ideal location for housing the herb garden. The site is adjacent to the kitchen door and will be easily accessible when we have the outdoor dining area complete one day.

New herb garden bed. 

Today I finished off the first of the two beds.... It turned into QUITE the ordeal. When I designed the beds I made them twice as tall as the front beds so that there was a more definite visual separation from the lawn since these two triangle beds outline the south side of the future patio and form the book ends for the paths coming down from the future rose garden. Needless to say once they were built I couldn't move them by myself. I also underestimated how much dirt it would take to fill them in. Originally I thought that the bed closest to the house would end up needing to be cut into the slope of the yard pretty significantly, and the plan was that the dirt would then be used to back-fill the majority of the bed. As it turned out, that didn't happen, and I had to actually raise up the far end of the bed just to keep it level and in line with the back slab.

Filling the bed

Well in the process of replacing what little dirt I had actually removed to level the bed I looked up and caught a glimpse of the weeds growing up inside the pool. not looking forward to another summer of spraying and chopping weeds in there I was thinking to myself how I needed to just get in there and clean out the entire mess since I'd have to dig it out one day anyway when I get around to installing my pond. That's when it hit me... I needed DIRT to fill in the herb beds and the pool just happens to be FULL of dirt! Can you say 2 birds... one stone? My only concern was that since the pool is covered in trash and debris I had never really investigated to see what the quality of the fill was. My luck it was filled in with concrete chunks or bricks or something else that would be utterly unsuitable. A few preliminary shovels and things looked promising. 

Getting started. One bucket at a time....

The soil isn't the best, but at least it isn't completely full of rocks. The first few inches are actually pretty decent top soil at this point from all of the years of leaves and weeds rotting in there. The only annoying thing is that I had to carry out the dirt by hand using 5 gallon buckets since I can't get the wheel barrow down in the pool. I managed to get 6 buckets worth of dirt into each wheel barrow load. After literally 50 or more trips back and forth the bed was filled and ready for a top dressing of peat moss and compost. 

After the bed was filled.

I made a dent in the pool, but there's probably PLENTY of dirt left for the second bed and then to level out the rose garden.... 

I tucked in my little herbs, added a bird bath, and installed the post caps. I'll mulch with straw tomorrow to help keep the moisture in the beds, but things are more or less done for this one. My very first truly dedicated herb garden! I couldn't be happier.

One down... one to go.

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