Specialty Gardening: Cottage Garden in the making..., 0 by gemini_sage

gemini_sage wrote:
The lucky thing about starting this garden is that the soil here is wonderful! Its very loamy with just enough clay to hold moisture well, but we're on a hill, so drainage is excellent too. The soils through much of this Bluegrass region came from limestone and tend to range from neutral to slightly alkaline. I amended the soil for some acid loving plants with peat moss, and save my coffee grounds compost for those areas.

I had lots of plants last spring to get in the pink bed, so I did a lot of sod stripping- uuugggg. In other areas I plugged in the woody plants, and sometimes stripped sod in a little island around the woody plants for a few perennials. Then I laid down cardboard over the sod and mulched with straw to connect the dots. In the areas where I stripped sod, I piled the sod up in areas where I wanted raised beds next to them. Then used cardboard over the piles and mulched with straw. By fall those mounds had "cooked" and are now the fluffiest black gold!

This bed is in the front yard, and is where I employed this method a lot. It started out as 4 little islands that I could barely fit the mower between. This spring its been fun being able to fill in the areas that have been under straw; its full of worms and digs like it was freshly tilled. A big, stupid mistake I made is evident all over though- Ornithogalum is everywhere! It was in some of the sod that was piled up, and of course it didn't compost. At the time I was thinking "oh, those little white blooms will be cute everywhere", now I realize what a problem they are! Most pull out easily, but where I've mounded layers of sod, they're too deep to get the bulbs. I'm resigned to a life-long routine of Ornithogalum removal, LOL.

This is looking west, with the pink bed behind me. Several Roses, lilacs, lilies, peonies, other perennials and a few bulbs are filling in the area now.