Over the past few months, I've made some big changes to our vegetable garden and I intend to publicise these "improvements" (I should say) in detail in future articles and videos.
But as the video at the end of this post shows, over the past few days I have concentrated my efforts on the central area of our patch where I'm adding additional raised garden beds and also laying rubber pavers around these beds to make gardening much easier.
Raised vegetable garden beds
I've found myself gravitating more towards higher raised garden beds over the past 5 or so years and I think the main reason for that is how much easier they are to maintain.
At the end of the day, I'm not getting any younger and the old motto I learnt in the Army "why do it hard if you can do it easy" rings true in my ears every time I'm stooped over pulling weeds from the garden when standing upright and pulling weeds is really more enjoyable… Well, "enjoyable" might be stretching it but is definitely is easier!
Rubber pavers around vegetable garden
And, to make life in the vegetable garden even easier I've decided to do away with our gravel inner pathways and instead lay rubber pavers. These larger metre x metre rubber pavers I got from Bunnings (a hardware store in Australia) are made from recycled tyres and is the same stuff you see on the ground of children's play areas. The mats are durable, nice underfoot, and most importantly will completely suppress any weeds from growing up and around my garden beds.
Laying weed mat first over top of sand/gravel and then rubber pavers (image above)
The gravel pathways served us well and did the job we initially wanted it to do and that was to prevent the grassed areas around our beds from turning into a boggy, muddy mess through our wet season (subtropical summer). Unfortunately, over the years the gravel and sand had become riddled with unwanted grasses and weeds to such a point it was taking literally hours each week to physically pull the pathways. This time could be better spent on many other projects so this past December I made the decision that this coming year would be a year of vegetable garden improvements to not only save us valuable time in the garden but would also look great.
As at today, I've nearly completed laying the rubber pavers to the central area of our raised garden vegetable patch – it's a little time consuming because I need to cut around all our beds and fit the pavers snuggly. The new raised beds just installed were easier to pave as I could lift the empty bed over the rubber mat and use it as a template to cut out around corners etc. Anyway, it will all be worth it in the end and it's starting to look rather nice!
This week, I'll be finishing off laying the rubber matting/pavers around our garden and also fill the new raised garden beds with soil in preparation for the autumn/winter growing season.
Be sure to keep tuned in for further updates on what's happening here at our own place. By the way, if you do find these type of update blogs interesting then please let me know by commenting below or sending an email because my usual style is to write complete articles; however, if people are supportive of "update blogs" I'll write more regular updates in between my main articles.
Here's the video update:
