raised bed

April Garden Rehab

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This April Bohemian Bounty was happy to work with an experienced gardener in Northwest Austin who had outgrown her current garden space. The garden was 20 feet by 10 feet and held in place by rotting railroad ties. Whenever we see railroad ties we strongly recommend removing them. Creosote, used to preserve the logs, is not approved for use in the landscape. It has a number of cancer causing chemical compounds and not what you want in contact with your veggies.

Bohemian Bounty designed a 2 bed garden, each 4 feet by 20 feet with a comfortable path between and around the beds. The narrow beds meant the gardener no longer had to walk in her bed while working the garden. To reduce materials, labor and cost, the gardens were built in-ground, but raised bed, with the beds being 6 or 7 inches higher than the pathways and border. The raised bed edges are supported by the walkway’s cedar and the beds have 12 inches or more of fluffy, rich soil for plant roots and improved drainage. Cottonseed meal, slow release fertilizer and compost were added to the soil to make up the previous gardening nutrient take and to loosen up the clay soil.

The Garden Gift: From Mother to Daughter

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Sometimes, clients request a garden as a gift for someone they love – and this garden was one of those special Christmas gifts. The gift goes to a sweet daughter and her family living in Creedmoor, TX.

A portion of the family’s backyard was an open field with mostly bunch grasses and full sun. The soil was mostly clay, but with some organic matter and worms and was a great base for plant roots to expand into. For this garden, we cleared a 24 by 28 foot section of the field, incorporated Garden-ville’s Rose Soil to the bed areas, tilled the clay and new soil together, built and installed cedar raised bed boxes, topped them off with more Rose Soil, added cottonseed meal and Medina Granular fertilizer, mulched the pathways with Garden-ville double-shredded cedar, and finally planted seeds and transplants with the family.

It was a great day of work and we had a wonderful time building and planting this garden with an enthusiastic, close family. The daughter kept telling us it was the best gift ever! Way to go mom! Stay tuned to see how this garden changes through Spring and Summer!

Winter Wonderland Garden in Austin

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A Native Garden: Using cedar logs for a raised bed garden

This fall we installed a unique garden made with native cedar logs. The winter vegetable garden design was done by Amy Crowell and the installation took two days. It turned out to be a beautiful garden structure and we look forward to see the beds filled out with the winter veggies. Congratulation Genny!
We also featured Genny’s compost pile in the slideshow because it a a great design example. The first images show the area before our fall rains and then you see the native weeds in the next images. During the build you will notice we use newspaper as our weed block. We have seen the store bought weed block in many yards and neither weeds nor veggies pay attention to the barrier. The one thing that does suffer from the separation of new landscaping and existing soils are the earthworms. Newspaper is biodegradable, and free and helps kill off the initial weeds but eventually decomposes to allow earthworms into your garden. The mulch and a gardeners diligent weeding will eventually rid that area of weeds. We will rephotograph this garden after a few weeks to see the progress.

Winter in Texas is very mild and the gardening challenges are minimal. If you are thinking of starting a garden, winter is the time…very few bugs, cool days with good sun, and more chances of rain. However, be aware that dry air and wind can desiccate plants as well as the hot sun so pay attention to your watering schedule. Check out our winter advice blog post.