Happy Earth Week! Today we celebrated our second Love the Boot at Galvez Garden and planted a new berry patch at the garden! Our design is very permaculture influenced and incorporated various layers, sometimes called lasagna gardening, in the process. It’s a really interesting layout and the result is a forest like landscape where the berries can grow and rest on mulch to prevent disease and promote a healthy harvest.

We started by moving all our potted plants from the area to create a blank slate for the new edible meditation garden. We collected bags of leaves and mulch in preparation for our event, pictured in the right of the image below.

Then we placed a layer of cardboard on the area where we planned to plant our berries. We added leaves that will breakdown, providing nutrients to the soil while promoting moisture within the area.

The berry patch is a mixture of several different methods of gardening. It incorporates vertical gardening, as the design is raised and no dig gardening, as we added the soil on top of the existing land. After the cardboard and leaves layers we made mounds by adding soil to define the new gardening area. You can see the cardboard, leaves and soil starting to take shape in the picture below.

A layer of compost was added on top of this to amend the soil and add nutrients to the mix. You cans see the spiral pattern and depth we created in the landscape by the children running around where we intended to plant our berries.

We should mention we were on site with Jazz Fest tickets to distribute to our Budding Artist families, so a lot of children were roaming the garden playing while we worked. Dylan and Troy did a great job of moving around signs and watering dirt. There were a couple of games of hide and seek involving children of neighbors that were dropping of food scraps, as our weekly compost collection we hold every Sunday fell on the same time as our Love the Boot event.

After we had everything in place we laid out where all the plants were going and added a layer of mulch.

We planted 9 raspberry bushes and close to 20 strawberry plants in the location. We added a small amount of manure as we planted to further enrich the new gardening area. We placed some broken concrete around to help hold the layers in place and retain heat, creating a new microclimate in the garden.

Additional concrete stones will be added around the rest of the area, but this reflects what we had available at the garden at the time.

The strawberries will fill in and help define the space while the young raspberries establish themselves and before they require staking. In a few years, we’ll add some kind of trellis system to guide the raspberries as they grow and spread.

The rain in the morning may have deterred some of our volunteers that signed up from showing up, but we completed the new berry patch with the help we had in just under two hours. The end result is a berry patch pathway that makes a neat new edible meditation area in the space. We’re excited to watch it grow and so happy with the new addition to the garden!