Part 1 - Working on a New Garden

Just a quick post tonight but I wanted to talk a bit about my new kitchen garden that I'm working on building. Well I will be as soon as the weather warms up and the snow goes away!

A couple weeks ago I gathered 3 truck loads of logs from a prairie restoration site. I'm going to be using these logs to build raised beds around a gathering area just outside of my backdoor.

Imagine walking outside and down a short path into an area surrounded by a lush and abundant garden filled with yummy vegetables. There will be a couple exits and at least one will have arched trellises with scarlet runner beans growing over it.

With a picnic table and eventually an outdoor kitchen this will be a great place for my family to spend time and enjoy our homestead all while being surrounded by food.

Gathering the Needed Materials

I have gathered a ton of logs but I'm still not sure I will have enough. I actually have more that is not shown in the picture (the bags are filled with fall leaves).

The garden beds will be partially burried hugelkulture beds but with logs on the outside to form a wall. The logs I collected from the prairie site are fresh so better to form the walls.

The wood that will be buried (see the above link) is a mix of hardwoods that I collected a year ago and some old rotten wood which is great for this kind of bed. The wood that will be buried is currently hidden by the black bags filled with leaves.

If all goes well the garden beds will need very little watering.

Degraded Site - Future Prairie

The prairie restoration site is an old Christmas tree farm that was abandoned so the trees got big and are very crowded. You can barely walk between them and it is very dark in the "forest".

All these trees are being cut down to clear the soil for future planting of prairie plants. Overtime this will be a beautiful prairie that will support a lot of wildlife.

But currently, it is just a degraded Christmas tree farm.

Turning a Waste Material into a Garden

All the logs are being gathered up and burned onsite--except for the ones that I got.

Since the restoration group was just burning the wood they let me have all I wanted for free. I may try to get another load before they finish...

I really like finding free material to use on my homestead. In this case I'm very happy to have found "waste" material that I can salvage and use to turn into a productive garden.

Since this group does this type of work on a regular basis I think I may have a never ending supply of wood for projects!

So at this point I have my garden area flagged out and most of the materials gathered. I'm just waiting for the weather to change so I can start digging.

Once I get further along I will share more pictures with you all. Hope you enjoyed this and I will try to reply to comments on this post and a few others tomorrow when I have more time.

Thanks all!