Do you look out and see an old, weedy, grass taken flower bed? Do you look at your neighbor’s “perfect” yard and wonder how much time and money they must spend to get it to look like that? Do you think “someday” I will have a cute flower garden or decorated yard? Well, this could be that day. Up-scaling a flower bed can take only a few hours if you have a plan and the will. Sit down and think about what you want your flower bed to look like. Look around and see what you have on hand that you can use to up-scale your flower bed. Up-scaling does not have to be expensive or time-consuming, but you must have a firm plan and be ready to put in a little personal labor.

You can spend any amount of money you want to up-scale your flower beds. You can buy fancy borders, substrate, gardening tools, decorations, and yard art. You can spend as little as you want, it just depends on your design ideas.

As you know by now, if you have read any of our other talks, we like quick, easy and environmentally safe. We go more for the natural look as well as using items we already have on hand. This way we can keep in mind our impact on our local environment as well as re-cycling pre-used items. We wanted to up-scale the rose bed in the front yard. We wanted a natural design as it is a family farm. So it was decided that terra cotta tubes and pine cones were the way to go.

The first step to up-scaling, after the thinking and the planning, is clean up. You will need to i.d. the plants that you want to keep and the ones that you do not. Block off the area that you want to use as your bed. We usually just draw a line in the dirt to show us where to work. You can tape off or stake off but a line in the dirt will do just fine. Clear out all the unwanted plants and safeguard the ones you want to keep. Make sure to clean to the ground to make a level surface, as best you can. Some ground does not lend itself to being level but that just adds character. You can even rake or till the ground if you like but be careful not to damage the plants you want to keep.

Once the ground is clean and ready, you will need weed block. You can buy traditional week blocker in several different sizes and materials from local hardware stores, Tractor Supply, Lowe’s, Home Depot and other places like that. Now we do not use the traditional weed block that you can buy at the hardware store. We use old sheets and re-cycle them into weed block for the garden, orchard, vinyard and flower beds. The old sheets are stronger and last longer that traditional weed blocker. Also, old sheets are cheaper to get than weed block. We normally just use the old sheets we have in house, when they are beyond bed use. But if we need more than we have on hand, we pick up cheap sheets at Goodwill or yard sales. The old sheets are also much easier to handle when you are trying to straighten them out under and between your plants. The ground is ready and you have sheets or weed blocker, just lay the sheets down on the clean ground. Arrange the sheets between the plants or bushes, in our case rose bushes. Make sure you get the sheets pulled up around the base of the bush, to get the intire ground covered. Anywhere you do not get the ground covered with the sheet, weeds and grass can come up.

The next step is to put down the substrate you are using to cover the ground. Many people use bark mulch, rocks, pebbles, wood chips, or paving blocks. We choose to use a resource that is readily on hand, pine cones. We spent 2 days picking up the local pine cone population, this cleans up the yard for moving and gives us free substrate. We put our pine cones onto the sheets to both hold the sheets into place and give a designed look. Spread the pine cones out to cover the sheets and fill in the area that you have blocked off as your bed.

Your next step is the border. You can spend all kinds of money on fancy borders. Borders come in every size, shape, color and material you can imagine. Just decide on the one that will go with the look you want. We choose old, terra corra drain tubes for our border. The tubes were already on hand, pulled up from a different project so they were free. The tubes also give the added use of being hollow so we can plant inside the tube border, if we want to in the future. We took a post hole digger and put each tube about half way into the ground. This leaves enough tube above ground to be obvious to whoever is the next to mow the grass. We do not want all that work to be destroyed by an oblivious lawn mover. Dig a hole, place each tube into the ground and cover, pack the dirt a bit to be sure they are secure. If you are using railing or bricks or whatever, the process is the same. Just be sure you get the border snuggled into the dirt enough to keep it in place.

Once we had the border all the way around, we went back and arranged the pine cones to cover the whole area, in a somewhat uninformed way. Be sure to use enough substrate to cover the entire area. Also, be sure you use enough to make it deep enough. You want the substrate deep enough to fill most of your border but not too much as to fall out over the top. The deeper the substrate the less chance of any weeds or grass getting through, if they manage to get by the weed blocker sheets. It is also a good idea to smooth out the dirt that you have displaced while putting in your border. The next lawn mover will not thank you for random lumps of dirt in the path.

Now is when you do whatever decorating you are wanting to do. We like the natural look so we did not do any painting or fancy designs. You can do any kind of design you like in your new bed. As I said before, you can spend all kinds of money on up-scaling your rose bed or any flower bed. But we had planned to use what was on hand, so most of our “remodeling” was free. We only put in personal labor time and items we already had around. The only thing that we bought specifically for this project was the lights. We often buy solar light stakes from the Dollar Tree. These stakes are cheap and a no brainer to use. Just decide where you want them, push the stake into the ground and the sun does the rest. The solar lights go off at sunrise and re-charge all day, then come on at dusk. They are pretty much waterproof and weather hardy so you do not have to do any pampering, unlike some yard art. Once the solar lights were placed in strategic tubes, our rose bed was done.  We do plan to come along later and plant seasonal flowers inside the tubes for some added color.

This was a simple, family project that only took a couple of days. It would have been quicker but we had to”harvest” the pine cones first. If you have kids you can teach them a love of gardening with some short, simple projects. Do not make your kids hate gardening by making them take part in terrible, long projects that take forever and are no fun. A few quick, fun garden chores can let your kids get a good taste for gardening and get your up-scaling done. It also can make for some good, fun family memories. What kid does not like to have fun getting dirty?

.

We hope you have enjoyed this walk though the up-scaling of our rose bed. Thank you for visiting and please come again for another edition of Out Standing in the Field.