After placing the first side of my new barrier garden edge system, I needed to get cracking on preparing some plantable area for all the seedlings coming on in the greenhouse. The aim: clear and dig over the area where my main garden beds were, removing weed roots etc as I go, and re-form the beds into longer east-west oriented beds and paths as I go. 

This round, I'm working over the space that was occupied by one row of four former beds, and the central path that ran between the two sets of four beds. 

I have worked in stages, as time and energy allowed. At the time of posting, I'm not quite finished this section, as a rib injury two weeks ago has prevented me doing any digging or lifting, or even much bending. (Note to the wise: do NOT climb over a fence without anchoring your foot very firmly, so you don't slip and come down ribs-first on the top of a square fence post!) 

The section you see covered in newspapers was the ONLY part of the garden where I actually did what I meant to do to the whole garden area last autumn - I had piled up lots of decompostable materials under the young apple tree, then covered the areas with black plastic and left everything to rot down. Now, I removed the plastic, lightly worked the surface to remove the couch roots that were still present (most of them directly under the plastic), and then decided to cover it in 5-6 sheets of newpaper, presoaked and overlapped, as I cannot dig this part over fully due to the roots of the apple tree. This is to prevent weeds coming back through. 

Next to that, I dug over the space that formerly had one wooden-sided bed in it, and the adjacent path area etc. This took a lot less time than I expected. I removed every bit of couch, buttercup etc I could as I went. I think scooped out the centre of this area to create a pathway, piling the extra dirt on the adjacent parts, which are the first sections of the new soon-to-be long beds. After a bit of raking and shaping, I spread a couple of inches of compost over both. 

The untidyness of the rest of that half of the garden area was annoying me, so I decided to get the weedeater out and just level it. While I was at it, I removed the wooden sides from that last bed on that side, and the first two beds on the other side, and weedeatered that too. 

I've since planted 3x Russian Silvery Fir tomatoes under the mesh, with tomato cages around them, a clump of Miner's Lettuce, and interplanted the brassicas with a tray of beetroot seedlings. And later added four more kohl rabi seedlings which were started later (for staggered harvesting). The covered bed is now full. 

At this point I still needed to remove the wooden frame from and dig over one small garden patch at the far end (where the fork is stuck in the ground), but my ribs have prevented me doing so. Today I'm finally feeling mostly pain-free, so it will be on the agenda soon! 

Many weeds are actually useful in their own ways, but my three nemesises in the garden are: couch grass, creeping buttercup and convulvulos (bindweed). One of the things that has been frustrating about the layout of my main garden beds (in particular) has been the way that the couch and buttercup continuously creeps into each bed from the paths and edges. 

One of the key concepts of permaculture design is to minimise edges. An edge is where a cultivated garden area meets a green path or an uncultivated area. It's from these edges that creeping weeds will, well, creep! These are the battefronts of the weed war. The more edges there are in a garden, the more fronts the gardener has to try and be viligent about. In a large garden like mine, that's a losing war! Besides, who really wants to spend all that energy keeping the creeps out of the garden when one has better things to do? In a garden set up like this, each 3.25m x 1.25m bed represents 12.25m of "edge" - multiply that by 8 beds, and there's 98m of edge battleground in my main garden beds alone - which ignores all the many, many other beds I now have in my garden. 

I spent quite a lot of time pondering last season as to how I was going to change this. I had also observed that the more or less north-south lay out of these beds made tall things growing in them particularly vulnerable to the gale force westerlies we have here on and off most of the year, and thought it would be better to relay the beds east-west when or if I change them. Added to which, these wooden beds, built in late 2012, were made from untreated timber, and while they have lasted way longer than I expected, are definitely on their last legs (and the cost of replacing them with the same is prohibitive - I paid $1/m for the timber then, and the cheapest I can get now is over $5/m). 

Naturally, I had all sorts of wonderful plans to overhaul this part of the garden over winter, so it would be all ready for spring planting. Suffice it to say, it never happened! In fact, with one thing and another, I basically had no time in the garden over winter. Even my intention to simply mow everything flat and cover it with black plastic to kill off the weeds until I could work on it didn't come to pass, except in one small corner. 

​So, when spring rolled around, these garden beds looked like this (pic taken 9th Oct 2017):

There are some silverbeet, leeks and chives in there, but otherwise, mostly just weeds. After the usual self-kicking for not having gotten it at least mulched or covered over winter, I did a bit more pondering and finally came up with a plan that just might work!

Key points:

• All the current wooden frames need to come out as they're falling apart. 
• Remove all the hoops, stakes and other miscellany still in there from last season. 
• Re-orientate the direction of beds. 
• Minimise "edge"
• Create a barrier around the new edge that will keep out my three nemesis weeds. 
• Make a "once off" major effort to clear these weeds from within the newly edged area, and thereafter minimise digging. 

After much looking, pondering, walking around, and imagining, I finally came up with, what if I:

• Dig a 30-40cm trench around the outside edge of the garden area. This is deeper than I find roots of these plants. Yes, I know they can theoretically go deeper if so inclined, but I'm hoping to keep them disinclined. 
• Line the trench with root barrier, a flexible, UV stablised plastic product that comes in a 60cm tall roll, 5m long. It's designed specifically to keep out roots. 
• Curve the bottom of the root barrier up, away from the garden - the theory being that if a, say, couch root hits the barrier and then heads down looking for a way through, it will hit the curve and be turned back away from the garden. 
• Use treated timber to create 30cm high edges above ground, with the upper part of the root barrier being behind the timber, between it and the soil. This allows me to use timber that will last longer, but to effectively line it so that any contaminates aren't leeching directly into the soil of the garden beds. 
• Use stakes to secure barrier and edging, and screws to hold them all together. 
• Work on the edging bit by bit - tackle one long side, then turn over the soil adjacent to it to create the first bed or two (so I can get them planted) before working around the next side and so on. Because the season is already under way and I have things needing planting! Make sure to overlap the root barrier at any joins between sections. 

So, this is what I have started to do. Pics below of the first long side being installed. It was a bit of a learning curve figuring how to make the theory actually work. But not overly difficult once one got going. 

I'll be repeating this around the other two open sides of this section of the garden, and just placing root barrier along the outside edge of the fence that makes up the fourth side. 

Next post: the digging and prep of the first half of the garden area, to eliminate weeds and create the first beds for planting.