Budz! You may remember a few weeks ago when the kid and I built an addition to our raised bed garden scene. The seedlings are all starting to grow and the new raised bed garden is coming along nicely. However, the raised bed gardens on the side of my house are lacking landscaping and general prettiness. Right now it looks like we just dropped a few raised beds in the yard, which we kinda did.

It turns out that mowing around raised bed gardens is not easy. I mean, I could buy a cool weed wacker but where’s the fun in that? I can’t pass up an opportunity to add yet another garden to this smallish city lot. So it’s on – a new garden for my gardens.

I’ve decided to meld things together a bit by adding edging around the gardens, see below for the plan to get the big picture. I would like to make a garden for the veggie garden. I know you guys, maybe it seems a bit excessive, but I can’t just let it stay the way it is. This could be the perfect opportunity to make that super quaint urban garden and pretty up the side of our house, highlighting it as a welcoming entrance to the backyard.

I’d like to use edging and make a new small border around the vegetable gardens removing the grass that causes me trouble mowing. The edging would follow the contour of the house as well as the contour of the foundation garden that runs along the side of our house. Between the veg gardens and the house there would be a meandering stone pathway sunk into the lawn. It would still be easily mowed over because it would be flush with the grass. There is a large dog wood that drapes over the “entrance” to the side yard and would frame out the entrance to the vegetable gardens creating a natural arbor. It will be bawse, I promise.

My dream plan is to start with mulch around the raised beds but after a few years have natural ground cover – heavy on the thyme, but also incorporating creeping Jenny (aka golden moneywort), stone crop and sedum to cover the border around the raised bed garden. Ideally I want ground cover that relates to the vegetable garden so using low lying perennial herbs would be a sweet idea. Towards the front of the house I would consider planting ginger or maybe a lavender plant if I could find one that was Minnesota hardy. You get what I’m throwing down my friends? I want a tailored garden this practical and pretty. This garden flanking a garden would create a sweet and lush pathway to our backyard. It would perfectly nestle our veggie gardens gardens and relate them to the rest of our gardens and flower beds. Woah, I just like, said “gardens” a lot.

To start I’ll have to dig out the grass. This is probably the number one reason why I haven’t just jumped into this project yet. Removing grass for lawns is always a super huge pain in the ass. First of all, it takes a lot of time, it’s super dirty and then you have to figure out how dispose of the grass/dirt. I could lay down plastic weed barrier killing the grass, but I don’t think that would be practical considering my main objective is to someday have ground cover. The barrier would not allow access for the ground cover to root and spread. So I have to dig up that grass.

Next I’ll put down one of those plastic edging thingies. I know, they are not pretty, but until I can invest in something hotter it will have to do. Once the soil is ready I’ll add mulch and ground cover. I’ll also sink in stepping stones and add two large pieces of blue stone in between the two gardens. Finding the motivation and the time is the first step.