NEW BACK YARD GARDEN BEDS
Tillers, y’all. Wowww do they help!
The new back yard garden beds are in! We had access to my father-in-law’s tiller and got to work creating garden beds that I designed in the last post. Over the last few years I have extended the garden beds that already existed by hand and it took an incredibly long time and was hard work. This tiller made it so much easier.
Now, this tiller was very large and my husband had to operate it but I believe there are smaller ones you can rent, which might be more maneuverable for people of my strength. We have never used a tiller before and there was a learning curve for sure, but we just did a couple of pass-throughs with it and it got up 90% of the grass in these beds and our vegetable garden in 1-2 hours. That would have taken me days and days to do manually using a shovel.
Overall, the work was about 2 hours of tilling plus initial raking. And then another 3 hours to edge the beds, pull out things the tiller didn’t get to, and mulch. There will definitely be some maintenance required throughout the growing season to manage any weeds or grass that peeks through but I’m very happy with these quick results.
The walkway is also “installed" aka placed on top of the mulch. It is made up of slate slabs that I found locally and that I have also used in my front garden. I love the look of the more natural stone as opposed to the more manufactured stone and edging you can find at big box stores.
I’m happy to get this big project out of the way so early in the season and can’t wait to start planting! I’ll have to be strategic with plant placement in some areas because parts of these beds hold on to a lot of water after rainstorms. Our yard actually has a natural spring under it, creating a lot of moss and some wet areas after big spring rains, but overall it’s not a problem (especially thanks to our french drain). Because of that, I now get to go on the hunt for water-tolerable shrubs and perennials that might like some soggy soil. The adventure continues!