August 2015, our first year on the expanded garden. We increased our growing area at least 20 times over what we had planted in 2014, yes we caught the bug pretty hard.
We really like the red woodchips from the big box store, they probably aren’t the best choice but they look nice and serve several purposes. The chips help keep the soil under them from evaporating water and drying out, this gives the soil biology a path between the beds. The worms, microbes, mycelium and other creatures and crawlia that require moisture benefit and many of them actually feed on the carbon addition they provide so they will slowly decompose over time and add to the nutrition in our ground.
In this second image, to the left of the path is our first comfrey bed we planted in 2014, it is inter planted with melons for this year, everything that is planted among the comfrey gains benefits from being close to those plants and some of the healthiest plants with largest yields have come from this bed.
Along the fence some sunflowers, can never have too many flowers in a garden especially in an area such as ours when you got to hang the “Bees Eat Here” sign out to make sure pollination is always good. Seems they have seen our sign because we always have plenty of bees.
The munchers have been at work, securing the garden against larger pests such as chipmonks, squirrels and rabbits is impossible. We are working though we are getting better at limiting their access.