Veggie Row and Living Fence

Well then, Mama N has indeed decided to play nice for the last few days so some stuff has gotten done in the yard, hooray!
Got the front two sections of the yard cleaned up and mowed the other day, so all looks at least passibly decent from the road. I pretty much just always leave my cutting clearance at four inches because a lot of the yard is kind of lumpy and I like my grass a smidge longer anyway.

So today is cool, breezy, and sunny.. My love suggested we do a fire tonight so long as the weather holds out. I told him, sure, clean out the fenceline of burnables. He grabbed the boys and away they went. Damn, didn't quite realize how nice it is to have a few extra pairs of hands helping out! While I finished setting up dinner in the crockpot and setting bread to rise the got a goodly bit of it done. I only helped at the tail end.
So with all of the wood cleaned out of the orchard section, I was able to mow there today. I went back over the veggie row and living fence strips a couple extra times with the mowing blades set lower than usual.
Then it was time to start pinning down the strips of black plastic that I'm using for marking off areas this year. Boy, that sure was easier with extra hands to help hold the plastic since it was so breezy.
Since I have the floor space in my workshop to lay out plastic and mark it, that's what I did. The plastic is ten feet wide, and I drew in four foot wide boxes on them. I can already tell that I like the three feet on either side of the veggie row boxes, but I will probably trim the living fence back to eight or even six feet wide, ten is just toooo much.

 So, here's the layout for the living fence. You can see a noticeable cut line of where I leave the grass normally at, and where I mowed it lower to lay the plastic over it. That stuff over to the left in the back is the messy raspberry bed, and you can see the peach and what's purported to be a plum tree on the right. Depending on how I trim the bed and what kind of trees I get, I may be able to add 2-3 more fruit trees into the orchard.

 This year the living fence is starting out as a three sisters row. I marked off three foot wide sections that alternate between corn/pole beans, and squash. The squash are just gonna get center planted, the corn/pole beans I did using a sort of square foot method. There will be six kinds of squash, five kinds of beans, and two kind of corn going in. I would rather have done just one kind of corn, but didn't have quite enough seed. So, gonna wing that one this year, haha.
Starting in this year maybe, but for sure next year, this area is going to be planted in with permanent stuff. Outdoor herbs and edible flowers, tea garden plants, those sorts of plants will eventually find homes here.

 Here's the veggie row. At the bottom you can see where I have my little bulb corner marked off. Got a couple lovely clumps of daffs that I want to break up and fill in a bit of the corner with.
I left the tail end of the plastics to butt into this corner. I want to try setting up a pair of chicken wire compost towers on them.

 As with the living fence that I marked, I also marked off this in their sizes and plant assignments. they are 4x8. I like the three foot borders, but I think I might sneak the box spacings down to two feet instead of three.

 Well, you can tell we laid out the plastic kind of crooked, but that's no big deal. This year is much more about determining spaces and all that jazz. When boxes are made and staked in, they will line up right, lol.

From both of our offices you can really tell the chunks of space that are taken up by all of this. I'm pretty pleased so far. Even if the plastic utterly fails, some plants die or whatever... This all still shows me in a very real sense what the eventual garden will be like. Or, at least these chunks of it. 

Gonna go do more stuff now...