All sorts of beds in the garden

22 - 25 Jan 2017

Still working on those Hugel beds whenever I can.  Progress is being made:

 This is the long view down the garden: the path slopes down between the berry beds on each side, then there is a marked out triangle under one of the new trees, which I hope to get dug out for this spring, the hugel beds to the left of it and the six rectangular annuals beds in the shadow behind that.

 Wherever the irrigation pipes cross the paths, I'm getting round to pickaxing out a channel and fitting little stones to either side of the pipe to protect it from heavy barrowloads.

 The hugel beds looking neat: big stones downslope to catch any soil runoff, cypress pieces upslope to trap water, and paving stones through the middle to hold down weeds and make it easy to plant and crop the beds.

 When the digger-man was originally levelling the site for the house, he came across a seam of un-stoney soil, which he very kindly put aside for the garden.  Five years later, I've come up with a use for it - to cover the hugel beds.  More digging.

 Meanwhile, the kitchen garden bed is looking a bit sad too, so I diverted a couple of hours to making it more accessible, with a path up the middle (called a keyhole bed in permaculture) and doing a bit of weeding.

  The fantastic parsley and 'selinos' (small Greek celery) plants that we put in this year have given us salad leaves all summer and are still producing.

 The hugel beds with a sparse covering of precious compost, and the start of the fresh dark earth from the heap by the house

 And a start on the next project.  This is a spot under the big olive tree.  It needs a terrace wall, and building up to level in a ring about the size of the canopy.  I'd like to get this sheet mulched and a bit planted this year too.  The sticks in the foreground mark wild asparagus plants that I don't want to destroy in the process.