Video of the flowers in our Arizona raised garden

Alfalfa hay added to the top of our raised garden beds in Arizona

A few days back I added a top dressing of alfalfa hay to our raised garden beds here in Arizona. Since we are leaving our hot temps, sort of, the cool nights will be here soon and the alfalfa hay around the plants will act like a blanket of sorts for our plants. It also adds some nutrients to the soil as it breaks down as well as adding a cool look to the entire raised garden bed. I plan on covering these raised garden beds with frost cloth when the real winter weather gets here.

Here are a few photos:

 This our larger of the two raised garden beds. The large empty looking space closest to us has a lot of herbs, however, yesterday I added a lot of flowers in this area to help bring in the beneficial insects.

The dark brown color of the soil to the left of the raised bed is not run-off or run-under from the raised bed, however, it is from spraying the hose. When our rain barrels are set up I hope to eliminate using the hose from the house and use only stored rain water.

 This is our smaller of the two raised garden beds.

Another picture of our smaller raised garden bed and our wine barrel with some wild flowers and other great looking flowers.

Raised garden beds now have seeds and small plants planted!

It's almost hard to believe that we now have something in our raised garden beds. I built both raised garden beds a few months back and have waiting unpaintenly to  plant anything in them  for soooo long! Now that the harsh Arizona summer weather has moved along, we can actually go outside and work in our new raised garden beds. Here are some photos depicting as best I can, how we layered our garden bed soil and what went into the mix and why.

A quick reminder of the size of our raised garden beds:Raised bed #1 is 10' x 3' x 18"
Raised bed #2 is 20' x 3' x 18"

First thing we did was to add close to 1"-2" of newspaper along the bottom of the raised bed for a carbon source.

Next we added some alfalfa hay to the raised garden bed. For this 10' x 3' raised bed we used about half a bale of alfalfa hay to cover the newspaper.

After adding the alfalfa hay, we added a few good shovel scoops of our very own compost! We were excited to use this compost since we started  our own compost pile some time ago in preparation for our raised garden beds.

Then it was time to add the worms! We added about 40 Canadian nightcrawlers to each raised garden bed to help work the soil for us as well as give us those great worm castings the plants love. We should be able to keep this raised garden bed soil moist enough to have these Canadian nightcrawlers live for and reproduce for years and years.

After adding our garden soil mix to fill in the raised beds and cover our worms, we added some bone meal and blood meal for a nice organic fertilizer boost. We mixed the bone and blood meal into the top 3"-4" of our raised beds with a metal rake.

The final step in adding the soil to our raised garden beds was to give it good soaking with the garden hose. Although we were spraying the garden bed with the garden hose after each layer of mix, it's a good idea to really wet it down after the layer is completed. This help the soil mix settle and let's you see any low spots you may need to level out.

Next thing on the list was to install our soaker hose that will water our raised garden beds evenly. This was done the following day since adding the soil to the garden beds took a while to do...it's not that I'm lazy, but see how long it takes you to shovel 10,000 lbs of soil mix into a wheelbarrow then shovel it into a raised garden bed, lol!!!!!!!!

Companion planting in wine barrels

Just added some companion flowers and plants into the yard and garden this past few days. Here are some images of our wine barrel flower beds.

 The empty spaces are filled with seeds that should sprout in a week or so. I have herbs in the smaller pots next to the wine barrels. You may also notice a cape honeysuckle in-between the wine barrel and the edge  of our raised garden bed in the top image. The cape honeysuckle should grow tall and provide both shade for the garden as well as beautiful orange flowers to attract the great hummingbirds!