Got out to the Camrose plot today for about 8 hours, and got a lot done. There are all the new pictures posted to the Picasa web album, so check them out! it’s come a long way from being a weed-choked plot a few weeks ago to where it’s now at. I think the addition of the first bits of hardware are really starting to give me an idea of how this is going to look in reality vs the diagrams I have on paper marking out the spacings and what goes where. Here’s a couple pics:
1/3 of the boards still to be dug in to frame the planting beds – north edge of garden.
1/3 of the boards still to be dug in to frame the planting beds – middle view of garden towards west.
View of southeast corner of garden. You can see the raspberry patch there on the east edge. There is also some grass in there which the resident dog Sox and my dog Lexie like to eat. So the dogs try to help when they’re not causing mischief. (I had to re-dig the SE bed several times as Lexie kept digging up and running away with the boards she could reach)
These show the garden with 2/3s of the boards dug in to frame the beds. The next thing to go in was the 3″ pvc vertical watering pipes. here we discovered that to rent a powered auger, you need to get to the store when they open, not at 2pm. we got a non-powered one and it was pretty useless. We (meaning Darren by himself since I was putting in rebar and cutting the trellis pvc), took quite awhile to get in the 3″ pvc and ended up using a digging stick, sledgehammer and a piece of 2×4 to losen the dirt and pound in the pipe. and though he hit clay at the 1.7 ft mark in some places, it turned out to be hours faster than using the manual auger. still hours could’ve been saved with a powered one. pictures of the watering pipes and rebar so far:
the rebar is easiest to see in this picture. It is light grey and visible around the edges of the beds.
This is the bed Lexie kept digging up the boards on yesterday. You can see how much grass and old plant matter are in the raspberry patch, but the canes -are- growing leaves.
While Darren was busy with that, I pounded in all the pre-cut rebar we had, cut the trellis pvc to size after realising I didn’t measure twice or even read my list with the measurements I wanted, so all the uprights got cut to 5ft instead of 6. crap. oh well, the trellises will be a little shorter….then I used pvc cement to attach the pvc elbows to the uprights and left them to cure for an hour. once that finished, it was time to insert the cross beams for a few of them before the light ran out for the day. I managed to get 1 section of mesh onto a frame to see better how things are going to look, here’s some pictures:
We’ll be going back out on wednesday to continue at the plot….building frames, getting compost, laying soaker hose etc…
