Something like seven years ago we installed cedar raised garden beds in the backyard in front of the daylily farm of the previous owner. Cedar is supposed to be rot-resistant and last a long time. Well, seven years seems to be about the length of its lifespan. The garden bed has seen a lot of slumping and is bowing out from the pressure of the dirt it contains. Some of the slats are also experiencing a bit of rot and their tongues have been eaten-away. Time for some reinforcements.
There’s a pile of old stone on the edge of the property also from the previous owners, some of which we’ve used in the past to construct a fire-ring. That ring’s time was up, so we dismantled it and harvested the rest of the stone from the ground to use as reinforcements for the cedar garden bed. It was a long day of hauling stone with the help of our all-electric tractor.
Jake replaced a few of the rotted slats of cedar with the extras from the original kits. He had to extend the chicken-wire fencing a little to accommodate the new stone boarder. The stones are firmly hammered into place against the cedar, holding it more upright, and the dirt adjusted to accommodate this change. We laid wider stones on the back row intentionally to make a bit of a stepping-path to suppress weeds between the vegetable bed and the daylily farm which I am letting rewild-itself. I have to pull-bittersweet back there twice a year, but otherwise I’m letting the lupine and goldenrod return, slowly giving away daylily plants in the meantime. That dense area of vegetation hosts hundreds of fireflies in the summer.
