The Garden Tour 2026

 

          On the blog for a bit we’re taking a break from the Fort Liberty series to talk about an event that happened last month. Some of you folks out there have heard about the Garden Tour event on this blog or in passing and it’s a yearly event in which the headquarters property is open to the public for just a few short hours. That property is about a half-acre, out of the total five acres in the operation. The tour this year was on June 14^th 2:00pm to 5:00pm which is a bit late but, just before the weather got really hot.  Normally the tour is in May on the weekend after Mother’s Day weekend but the garden upgrade timetable didn’t get far enough along to allow the tour to happen at its usual time. The delays came in several forms, at the time we were getting rain, shipped materials had delays, and arranging the funding for materials was a bit hectic. However, the tour this year had a good attendance and despite a sudden rain shower which forced everyone off the field for about twenty minutes things turned out ok. Undoubtedly some of you are wondering what a Garden Tour is, and the short answer is that it’s the continuance of a tradition that goes back to 2010.  Way back when, a group called Sustainable Sandhills ran an organized Garden Tour that focused on the exchange of information from urban farms, victory gardens and other local green-oriented operations to encourage folks to grow more of their own food. At its height there was a tour in two counties at least a dozen locations in Cumberland County alone and the event was almost an all-day affair. The original tour is how my Nursery operations started because visitors asked me for what I was growing at the time and I had a few starter plants and no idea it would turn into anything. Years and acres later the nursery is a not-for-profit microbusiness of sorts operating as part of a bigger farming system.

 

          This year’s garden tour had quite a bit of a lead up, months of planning and early operations went into the arrangements that intrigued and delighted guests this year. As I mentioned, the tour almost didn’t happen. When I started the planning phase of things in November of 2025, it was decided that I had to renovate at least five critical areas and at a bare minimum three out of five needed to be completed in order to have a tour. Those areas were the Vegetable patch (two beds), the Tall raised bed, the old flower bed, and the Reinforced Mound Bed. Almost all of those beds were brick-lined, so part of the planning was figuring out what to do with the brick. The problem was that it was easily hundreds of bricks and in the case of the garden beds that were walled with brick over the last decade plus, some of them had sunk into the soft sandy soil. In the case of the Tall Raised Bed, the brick had sunk a full two layers in. Recovering the masonry was partially planning for new uses as much as it was excavating and cutting the old bed edges to fit the new raised bed material, moving earth and of course calculating for the amount of back fill. There was math and a little bit of masonry and a bit of engineering involved here and I don’t even want to think of the labor hours expended. The cost of the upgrades to the garden was not exactly expensive compared to what it cost when I built the garden, but they were not free either. Truthfully, had it not been for all the Mushroom Compost that came from Sandhills Mushroom Farm, this project would have exploded its budget for back fill.  So in that light, Today, I’m going to start the Garden Tour series with the garden construction in progress and via photographs show you the process of the Reinforced Mound Bed’s reconstruction.

 

 

As you can see, after clearing of weeds and overgrowth the RFMB has seen better days. The soil has shifted, the brick edging is hogging pretty badly and there's nothing useful growing in there at all. Original measurements indicated the bed was a little over six feet wide and just over twelve feet long.

 

 

The first step of any good plan is to take measurements and draw out what you plan to do. The RFMB was a rectangular bed that I decided should be split into two separate beds and the sketch above is intended as a herb-bed with a Fig planted in the middle.

 

 

 

 

 

As I'm fighting off the weedy masses the Neighbor's cat Kiki decides to help me dig out weedy tree saplings.

 

Exploratory digging is next, I needed to know how deeply the bricks had sunk, and thankfully it was only about half a brick down. This is good because I do not have to do any serious masonry extraction.

 

Aggressive clearing of the weedy population comes next. I had to keep an eye on conserving the existing soil because, well look at it, that's some decent stuff in there. With the weeds gone you can really see how bad the brick walls were hogging.

 

 

At this point I take another set of measurements because the bed is being split in two. The trench dug there is as much to save the decent-quality topsoil as it is to tell me where to stop extracting bricks.

 

The trench I dug also serves another useful purpose, it shows me where the new path will be so I can maintain access to the side gate in the background.

 

The last of the bricks are extracted from the work area which creates a nice little pre-dig allowing the new raised bed to settle in, using the same space.

 

Here is the new raised bed, it's a nice square 5x5 made of coated steel and each modular kit takes about 45 minutes to assemble. These things are pretty hefty and held together by hex nuts and screws.

 

Put in it's new home, the new raised bed looks pretty good. Btw, in case you are wondering, I picked the white color to reflect heat away from the soil during the hottest months to reduce plant stress and watering needs.

 

The first plant to go in, because it was the largest is the unknown Fig. I traded to get this fig and have no idea which variety it is, but the person who traded it to me claims it's an LSU type. Since it will displace the most soil, it has to go in the ground first.

 

The next step is back filling, and this garden bed got 6 cubic feet of Mushroom compost as a additive between the original topsoil and the soon to be applied new topsoil.

 

The new topsoil is a basic promix styled potting soil, that is added to bomb the bed with organic matter and guarantee it's ability to retain reasonable amounts of moisture.

 

 

 

The finished bed looks like this on the day of completion. Expect a more current photo in the next blog post.

So folks, this is how half of the RFMB got renovated. It was the last bed I worked on before the tour and was completed about a week or two prior. At the current time it contains an unknown Fig, Chives, Fern Leaf Yarrow, Hurricane Lilies, Jalafuego Peppers, Italian Chicory, Garnet Stem Dandelions, Wintergreen, Texas Tarragon, Parsley, Coneflower, Cutleaf Coneflower, Southern Wormwood, Berggarten Sage, Celriac, Lovage, Juniper Thyme, Santolina and Lavender.  Basically it's a nice food and herbal medicine garden which is what the original garden it was built on was intended as.