Raised Beds

I have the occasional panic attack so there are times that I cannot leave my yard without anxiety, let alone the house. These last few days have been that kind of week.

I have found that as long as my neighbours don't notice that I am outside and don't say anything, I am fine with being in the yard and working.  So instead of being a shut in, I am a yard in... But as soon as someone said anything to me, I tended to run into the house until they went away.

 Anyways, since no one was around, I worked in the yard. I find that it calms me.

The boyfriend brought home a pile of flattened cardboard, so I got around to peeling off all the tape, removing any staples and lying them down, staggered over each other, as a weed barrier. I placed the second bed on top of them and filled it with soil.

The large pile of soil you see in the back of this picture is the soil I used to fill the bed. Nice, fluffy, humus-y soil, full of nice organic matter. It's the remnants of my old garden bed. My friend, Noel, loaned me her soil screen and I went to town removing all the larger rocks and the neighbour's cat's poop(I will leave them a nice present in their yard at a later date....). This also helped to level out the area so that the next bed would be ready to go right in when the boyfriend gets another batch of cardboard.

I moved six Swiss Chard plants that had over-wintered in one of the old beds into the new bed, as well as, three rather sad and stunted onions. We will see if they survive.

I have another pile of lovely soil in the back yard, so hopefully, I wont have to shell out any money for a bunch of soil. This is all the original soil from my yard, so it should not deplete the top soil too dreadfully.

I only went with a twelve inch tall bed since I do not plan on planting anything that is too deep rooted with eighteen inch aisles between the beds, which should give me plenty of room to work on either side.

Now, to figure out how to keep the neighbour's cat out of bed without resorting to a slingshot...