When I last left off, I had a minor issue with the last of the bucket raised beds when the center board broke completely, causing the buckets to fall in on themselves. At least when they fell in, they kind of fell against themselves where they didn't just hit the ground and break and dump dirt everywhere. So, after removing the buckets with their plants, I sourced another 2x4 to make the repair. After measuring and trimming the board down, I had to cut the protruding nails from the frame that were used to hold the 2x4 in place. From there, instead of just driving deck screws through the frame and into the 2x4, I took some surplus framing brackets that were used for holding our old porch together. These brackets are made to fit around the end of the board and hold it against another board. With two brackets and a few shorter wood screws, I had the middle board hung back up. I didn't finish the repairs here however. Since this frame was held together with nails secured with a nail gun, eventually the structure began to weaken in spots. To remedy this, I used some longer deck screws in certain spots around the frame to reinforce the frame/table and make everything sturdier so the frame won't have any sway, especially under the weight of eight full buckets of wet dirt. The end 2x4's on this frame have some degradation just as well but for now are still solid enough to hold the buckets up. In time this structure will need to be replaced as the wood continues to rot away. The next thing I did in the garden was address a couple fig trees that for some reason or another, seemed to completely die, except for a few small branches at the base of the tree. The larger branches on the tree just died, and died to the core. I ended up cutting all these dead branches and pulling up some weeds from around the base of the tree to hopefully give the living branches and pieces a chance to grow and hopefully recover the tree. Our oldest fig tree suffered some of the same issues, just not as bad, so I only had to trim a few dead branches from it. I would imagine that these trees would probably do good to be trimmed at times just to rid the greater tree of weak and dead branches before any issues migrate throughout the entire tree. This fig tree was almost completely dead save for a few small new growth branches at the base. Some mint sprigs popped up around the base of the tree as well as some weeds. I pulled up the weeds, but the mint may remain as we can harvest this stuff later. Mint is almost worse than weeds, due to the fact that this mint plant was planted over 10 ft away in another spot several years ago. Note the cut branches in the background, some of which has already been moved to a brush pile. Along with this trimming and cleanup, I took a moment to get some base measurements in order to get some new wood in order to build another bucket raised bed, as well as a double half drum raised bed, since I have these planting components currently laying on the ground. I would like to get the new beds built in order to clean up the garden that much more of the planter buckets and drums. The garden is another area of the compound that continues to need things done to make it better and more complete. Hopefully more sooner than later I'll get the raised beds and hydroponics built that I want to do to fill up the garden area enough that I won't have to worry about building anything else, just maintain.
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May 2023
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