I mentioned a while back that we were thinking about digging up a bunch of the pavers in our courtyard and putting in some new growing beds. Although I haven’t mentioned much more about, we have been thinking about how to realize this plan and finally found the perfect edging stones that will help us complete the task at Bauhaus (home improvement store). The stones are called “Rasterstein SL” and are 30cm long, 20cm high and 20cm deep. We wouldn’t have minded if they were a bit higher but we’re going to use the space inside each stone for different herbs and the length of these stones works out really well with our existing structures.

Stefan actually went and place the order for them this morning…so 62 of them will be delivered on Friday. As soon as they arrive, it will be time to tear into the courtyard…literally.

We’re also going to get a bunch of soil delivered so that we can fill up the beds with new, fresh, health soil (already mixed with compost). The plan is to make these beds within our courtyard our daily vegetable beds (since we can tend them regularly, harvest often and don’t have to worry about slugs) for tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers and other veggies we typically eat. We’re way too late to start seedlings now so we’ll just have to depend on the seedlings we find at Dehner (garden center) and elsewhere.

Then we’re going to transition our garden behind the barn into our aquaponics greenhouse and possibly remove the raised beds to try an herb spiral and perhaps a bit of keyhole gardening. We’ll use the garden to grow larger vegetables, lots of fruits on bushes and vines and perhaps even some special potatoes that are harder and more expensive to get around here.

Until that arrives, I’m working on cleaning the darn weeds out of the cracks in our courtyard and in front of the house. It’s a mind-numbing task but the progress is very noticeable. And Stefan will be building a few new Jake’s chairs for the courtyard which is going to be fantastic. We have one which is wonderfully comfortable…Mackenzie has already claimed it as her own. So we’re going to build at least 2 more and probably some cool fold up Adirondack chairs that I found plans for on Lowes website. More about all those later.

What are you up to this week?