RAISED BED ORCHARD DONE

So in between sprinkling rain showers, this was my weekend project, something I've been preparing for but always waiting for clear weather.

Raised beds before

So this is what I started with.

This is the raised bed orchard behind the house.  Yikes!  I put in the center beds a month or so back, they have the citrus in them.  However, the "EZ Straw" that I used as a mulch over the Winter ended up sprouting and growing wheat!  I had to get rid of that (more on that in another post this week). 

Raised beds out of control

What I did was pull it up in clumps and then I cut the wheat stalks off and put them in the center beds and just tossed the clumps on the ground.  It took some time but when I was done, I realized I had made a mess.  Also, there was still grass that was hard to pull up in the beds.

Cleaning up the raised beds

I got the mower and edger out and went to work.  First I edged, around the beds and then used it inside to take out the shorter grass.  Then I used the mower to mow over the weeds, grass and clumps that I had pulled up.  A few passes over and over and it was all chopped and dispersed into the winds, ha.

Almost like vacuuming the yard!

Backyard orchard

Then I loaded each bed with a bag of soil and topped it all off with a bag of mulch (no more straw, ha).

Raised bed 

Here's a bed closeup before...

Raised bed

...and after.

Watch out weeds, if you pop up now your days are numbered!  Now that we have them like this, we can keep them like this.  Since I knew it was going to be an almost all day project, it was one of those that kept getting put off because of the weather.  But Saturday, the weather cooperated just long enough for me to get this done.

Raised fruit tree beds

I watered them well and stood back and admired how nice it FINALLY looks.  This is what we imagined three years ago when this project was started.

Since we have the raised bed garden for herbs and vegetables, we've decided to make the area behind the house the main area for our fruit.

We now have:

2 peach

2 pear

2 apple

2 plum

1 lemon

1 lime

1 orange

And off camera:

1 fig

1 pomegranate

2 mayhaws

Raised bed orchard

They are all now thriving and doing well and have grown nicely since being planted.  Here is a shot that shows how the new citrus are oriented into the existing orchard.  The plan is that as the trees become established, because these beds are "open" at the bottom, the roots are obviously finding their way down into the ground (the raised beds give them a head start) and eventually we can just remove the wooden sides and then there will just be hills of soil and the grass will grow to cover it.  

Out of the camera shot is the fig tree that struggled but is now finally growing (though it is more of a small bush than a tree, I need to trim it up) but we think we might plant a couple more fig trees (getting actual taller trees).  The next project is to find a spot to put the banana trees back there and then find a spot for a muscadine grape vine trellis.

Let the fruit start coming in!