What does a crazy gardener do when they run out of space? Well make more of course :-) A friend of mine is returning from the Netherlands with 85 euro of bulbs and the perrenial border was chock full of plants from the last 8 years of gardening...definitely running out of space.
Rather than not adding more plants (because that would be really a crazy concept), I decided to widen one of the perrenial borders (I will be expanding a couple of other smaller beds to accomodate bulbs and some new plants I acquired this year.
I am not a big believer in power tools in the garden, I think it is a waste of precious resources (electricity or oil) to run a tiller. So I broke down the small rock retaining wall, used a construction spade to mark out and break up the grass, then used a hand cultivator to remove the grass as well as mix in the soil ammendments (peat, compost). I then added a small garden edge that only came to the ground level then backfilled the bed. I rebuilt and reconfigured my rock wall.
Voila! a perrenial border that was once only three feet wide is now six feet wide! Room for bulbs, new perrenials and I even made room for some annual chinese brocoli since I didn't have room for it in the formal potager!
Happy Gardening!
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