More Space

Before digging out

It's close to 19 years since I moved here and I finally got round to partially digging out the other side of the stepped beds.

There are 3 tiers with "retaining walls". The top tier uses log roll as the retaining wall. The middle tier uses a brick wall, the bottom tier uses large stones. It probably looked really good back in the day, but these days it's awful.

Half of the log roll on the top tier has rotted and collapsed. The rest isn't far behind. Parts of the brick wall on the middle tier have collapsed and the rest is leaning over. The stone on the bottom tier is fine. All 3 tiers were full of very large and deep rooted weeds and brambles and had some very large lumps of concrete on them, probably from old fence post supports.

After digging and sheeting

A friend came over to help clear the beds so we could use them at last. We removed all the large lumps of concrete and dug out bramble roots that had stumps over 8" thick. The worst of the weeds have gone, but they'll all come back eventually.

After about 4 hours, we'd cleared as much as we could, so levelled the beds as best we could and sheeted over the whole lot. We then moved all the sacks of potatoes onto the new beds. It's nice to have that bit of extra space. We should be able to move more pots and troughs around this weekend.

We'll need to do a lot more work on these beds. Digging out to build new retaining walls will be a lot of hard work. Might give it a go over the winter.