Last week my article was about daffodils and selecting garden beds for the early, mid-season and later daffodils.
This week's article is on turning a temporary daffodil bed into a permanent one. The picture here is how this bed looked in April, and before I started rebuilding it. The bed that I chose to rebuild this year was my mid season bed on the back side of our property, and surrounded by trees. This bed is also a challenge as it is pushed into a small area, with other gardens, shade and fruit trees around it.
I used a "bobcat" with a bucket on it to scrape up the existing soil and spread it across another portion of the property that I wanted to convert to grass. "Sorry Carol, but someone has to grow some grass." I didn't want to spread any potential problems from that soil to other areas that would be growing bulbs, or perennials.
The first step was to get rid of all the soil that I had used to make my temporary beds last fall. You can see from this picture that the removal leaves a large barren place in the soil. I replaced the soil because I was not satisfied that the existing soil would contribute to anything good, and also on the old adage that you don't plant daffodils back on top of old daffodil plantings, unless you either chemically treated the soil, or replaced it. I replaced it. The English, Irish, New Zealand and Australians live by that adage, to almost a religion. I'm a deep believer myself.
Raised Beds
My objective was to create raised daffodil beds, and photograph the process along the way. However, I got so busy with building the framing that I forgot about taking pictures, and, therefore, have no pictures of the finished frame before I filled it with composted "mushroom" soil. The sides for the frame are 2X10X16 pressure treated bridge decking, placed about two and three inches above the bottom level. The 10 inch wide boards gives me a 20 inch deep frame when turned on their edges. I used 4X4 by five feet long posts sank 30 inches into the ground as supports. Before the soil was applied, clean dirt fill was used to back-fill alongside the outside of the bottom decking boards to insure that the internal fill did not excessively push out and collapse the frame.
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