Cleaning Gramma’s Garden & Rebuilding the VegoGarden Bed

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These past three weekends, Mr. Ethereal and I have been working over at his mother’s home here in Denton, Texas. Gramma has decided after several years of living here to move back to California. She decided to move to Texas after my father-in-law passed in 2020 (not from Covid, but failing kidneys) to be nearer us and to get away from sadness and 50+ years of memories…

This is her front flowerbed near the street between two small oak trees. We added even more flowers as Lowe’s had their big Labor Day sale of 4/$10 and 5/$10 mums. I planted while Gramma boxed up things inside.

Working at Gramma’s

But the transition from California heat to Texas heat with much higher humidity is pretty tough and she’s ready to “Go home.” So… Hubby is back helping her move furniture and boxes out of the house and into her garage, putting some things up for Facebook Marketplace, and massively weeding, mulching, trimming and treating trees. ***We worked over a course of three straight weekends.

All the things!

This past weekend, Mr. Ethereal took down the pergola we found for Gramma at Lowe’s on sale at the end of the season a couple of years ago. It has withstood a lot of wind without any permanent tie downs. It was nicely sheltered from winds here.

We will repurpose it back at our house somewhere, although we did ask our daughter if she’d like it at her rental home. She said they couldn’t put one up. 🙁

***Update, I read her text wrong and she CAN have the pergola up! We will bring it to her when we are able to later this winter.

Two weekends ago, Mr. Ethereal went through and rototilled and hoed this long planter bed for weeds. I hand-weeded the remaining weeds. He split open bags of mulch and created piles, then I raked this black bark mulch all around the dirt.

Prior to this chore, I thinned the crepe myrtle trees, treated for black mold/fungus and used the Bayer Rose Feed (Five treatments in the one application) on every plant back here.

This garden bed turned out great! the lawn is greening up after more grass seed was spread and milorganite (mostly ferrous iron) was spread around the lawn.

After three weeks, though, we are BEAT!!! Gramma is worn through boxing up everything inside and moving boxes around. She took this Monday off and slept off and on. I checked in with her earlier this evening. 🙂

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Rebuilding the VegoGarden bed at home

Gramma and I talked it over and we decided to take down her vegetable garden bed and return the space to lawn. I shoveled the dirt out into buckets after removing all of the vegetation. I also found three new friends!…

***Update, the grass was already growing in just four days later, and tall!!! We only had some rye grass with us, but will overseed later with fescue.

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This smallest of three toads was found living in the planter bed itself. Photo taken at 9:30pm inside my car. Gramma gave up one of her Glad plastic keepers for his travel box! Holes were cut into the lid for air. 😉

I also found a small black Texas hognose snake, usually not a problem for humans. I brought it home to eat rats around our garden. It had been living happily with the three toads. As soon as I got home, I took this guy out back and released him to be near the other two toads. I heard one of them rustle in the plants and was glad that they had stayed around where I had left them.

I lay down 1/4″ hardware cloth underneath the new VegoGarden container, cut with the grinding wheel into 3′ sections. Hubby came through on Sunday and took apart the touching end sections and rejoined the two beds into one long rectangle.

He’s a trooper! After revamping this one, he used the four leftover corners and screwed them together to make a small square.

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How I constructed this Hygge method of layering

• I put in the partially rotted logs from the original planter bed planted at Gramma’s
• a ton of dried leaves we had laying in a paper bag on a bench plus more leaves over near the compost pile
• then, partially decomposed wet leaves followed by true composted dirt mixed with the compost from Gramma’s bed.

The dirt created in my compost pile is totally black now and at the bottom of the piles. I am amazed at how just heat from the sun, wet greens layered with dried leaves can create a ton of dirt in one year…

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I spent a good hour or so moving grass and partially composted wet grass/leaves from the left side over to the right side of the pile. This really should be two separate bins but I didn’t build it this way…

And actually for composting, you need three bins to move compost from bin to bin to bin throughout the year:

1. The first for tossing in fresh clippings and leaves (wet and dry, back and forth).
2. The second bin is for when you turn your first bin out (about 4-6 mos. full). You move everything to the second bin to restart the first with new fresh vegetation.
3. The third bin is for the final finishing of the compost and it should be mostly broken down and then turns into nice black soil!

So that’s what I’ve been up to the past few weeks, y’all!

Most of the hard work is done for Gramma and now she will finish staging and cleaning inside the house. I’m ready to decorate more for fall!

Gramma had a good haul of from her garden. She even had carrots growing, in August/September!

She was blessed to have this VegoGarden bed on the eastern side of her house. It’ll now be on my south-western side, so big difference! I am able to grow wonderful potatoes. I will have to treat for white fly for the carrots, though. They ate all my carrot starts. 🙁

And for all my hard work, Gramma gave me a couple of containers! Here is one and the other I will share in an upcoming fall home tour.

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Have a happy week, dear friends,