Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Change in plans

I drew up a plan for the new garden quite a while ago.  I really liked the idea of the little joined rings, right up until I started to build the beds. 


My first problem was an error in measurement somewhere.  When I started to build the two beds in the middle row, to the right of the pathway, I quickly realized there was not room to build them as I had laid out.  I wanted the paths to be 30" between beds as that is a comfortable path for using my garden cart.  I was going to end up with the two beds very close to each other, so I decided at the last minute to just make one larger bed.

Next, I was preparing to build the rings, and when I calculated the extra blocks I would use and the reduced planting space of the design, I decided to change them.  I swapped the smaller triple rings on the left for two more 3'x6' rectangular beds and the small triple ring on the right for a larger double ring.  I may still add the third, smaller ring to what I ended up building as medium double rings, but that's going to have to come later.


This is what I actually ended up building (with some excellent help from the hubby last weekend) though the strawberry bed isn't built yet.  I will probably end up changing the two small rings to the far right (the bottom ones, the top one is at the corner of the fence and has rhubarb growing, I'll probably leave it alone).  After a  quick look at the pile of landscaping blocks after building all the beds shown (except the strawberry one) I have 100-120 blocks left.  I suspect I will add some more beds to the right side next year, but I'll figure it out after I get stuff planted and see how they do.  So far I've got about 250 square feet of bed space, I think almost twice what I had before (though I'm being lazy and not actually looking up how big the other garden was, I think it was about 130 sf) but I want to try giving the plants more space to grow than I did before.  We'll see how well I do with that once I've got it planted :-). 

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