We had some pretty bad storms roll through here a few weeks ago. We got a lot of rain and wind… our big patio umbrella got picked up and thrown through one of the hoop beds. Thankfully we had no major damage though but we did lose a some fruits off of some of the trees.

The rain caused a bit of flooding in the garden area but we are working on getting that remedied. One of the things we did was to dig some shallow trenches in front of a couple of the planting areas to let some of the water drain away and go to the plants… win, win!

A neighbor also gifted us a grapefruit tree that was loaded with baby grapefruits so I needed to make a place for it… the night before I had actually been thinking of creating a Hügelkultur-style bed with parts of a tree that we had recently knocked over.

Hügelkultur is a raised bed that uses old rotting wood, plant debris, compost, and soil to create a mounded planting area. Many times these beds are mounded up pretty high as the material will break down but ours is not nearly that tall. We also filled our larger raised beds with branches and stuff that would break down over time.

You can see in the photo that a lot of the water had cleared up in one day… yay!

Everything was pretty wet and yucky but I put on my rain boots and got to work. I did not include a lot of old logs in the center of the bed as I didn’t want to have a bunch of air pockets where I intended to plant the new tree. I did mound the dirt up pretty high in the center though as I didn’t want the tree to constantly have ‘wet feet’.

I did build up the rest of the bed with logs, twigs, pine needles, leaves, compost, and dirt. It took me several trips with the wheelbarrow to collect everything I needed to finish the bed but it looks pretty good… much better than the flooded area we had before.

I used some of the mud up against the outer edges of the bed to help keep the outer logs in place until everything gets settled in. We also filled in the lower part of the garden bed with a bit of dirt to help the water drain to the ditch instead of in the garden. The horseshoe bed was designed to catch some water but we also had water standing behind the bed which made it difficult to walk around it.

The kids also sprinkled some wildflower seeds along the ditch… not sure how they will do but hopefully some will come up and add a bit more color to this area. I threw a few sweet potatoes in the dirt here and a couple of flower seeds. I’m not sure what I’ll be planting here but I wanted to get something growing so that the weeds wouldn’t take over this spot.

Here is an updated picture:

We still need to dig another couple of trenches so that some of the overabundance of water can drain elsewhere but that was all I could do for the day. One step at a time! Shyanne is thrilled that she can ride all around the yard again.

Hope you all have a great day!