[LUCAS]:

[The original Betty-Bed, just before we started reshaping…]

Here’s the new garden bed that Betty from the cafe (along with her crack team of hand-picked students) built a few weeks ago. At the time, Betty said:

“It’s nothing special, the shape of the bed and everything can be modified later, it’s just to get something in and growing first, and worry about all that down the track.”

So this week the boss and I decided the time was right to reshape the Betty Bed.

Our main concern – besides aesthetics (as Betty says, square isn’t the prettiest shape for a garden) was depth. We wanted to reduce the footprint of the bed, make it a bit smaller, so that the soil in there could be a bit deeper in sections. Inspired by Cecilia’s bed, we decided to create a diversity of shapes, depths and micro-zones within this bed.

We began by chopping into the front corner, raising the sandstone blocks taller so they’d support more soil within:

Humming away in dirt-under-fingernails contentment, we inserted an old plastic plant pot as our new resident pond; on the right hand side of this picture you can also see the little niche we installed, for fun as much as for any other reason:

Along the way, We encountered a few creatures which indicated there is sufficient moisture present, at present, to support such biodiversity:

(I believe Heather relocated this fellow to “the bottom of the garden”. And that’s actually not a euphemism, she really did that.)

The sun came up, and we replanted all the seedlings which we’d had to temporarily remove while reshaping:

And here’s the “finished product” (with all due acknowledgement, of course, that at Tending, there is no such thing):

Besides incessantly chatting and bickering with each other, socially, it was a quiet day at Tending. Not many human visitors. After reshaping Betty’s bed, we stopped to admire the lushness of our brassicas:

We watched the rains come in:

And some local faulty engineering made us consider the possibility of water harvesting:

Finally, we “obtained a yield” – sharing some of our abundant lettuce and mustard greens crop with a couple of friendly students who were sheltering from the storm:

-Til next week, Tenders!