The Garden Tour 2026 Part III

          On the blog for a few weeks we’re taking a break from the Fort Liberty series to talk about an event that happened in June.  There was an event at the Trial gardens, garden tour which is a yearly event held in the spring. You can see the full details of what the tour is, when it is held and other information about it on the July 16^th post at the link below.

 

https://bl2-litfm.blogspot.com/2026/07/the-garden-tour-2026.html

 

 

In today’s post we’re looking at the reconstruction of the Tall bed. Now despite what you see in the photos, this bed used to be even taller. Erosion of soil and the sinking of masonry caused it to lose height as I removed layers of bricks over the years. The only good solution was to use the same raised bed kit that I had used on the vegetable beds. Since it was a modular kit with a couple of standard shapes it could fit the shape perfectly.

 

The existing survey of plants in the bed with measurements based on old notes.

 

As the saying goes, measure twice cut once. I took a second measurement after I did the sketch just to be sure. That document in the  picture is the info pamphlet that comes with the modular garden kits and the cat is Kiki, she's the neighbors cat who comes over every time I'm in the garden.

 

Technically this isn't part of the process but, Kiki likes to ride around in then wheel barrow.

 

 

The next phase was brick removal, and at first I was moving them by the wheelbarrow load.

 

Then the supervisor got involved.

 

Finally I just started piling the bricks off to one side. This  is partially because I needed to see how deep the bricks had sunk into the ground.

 

Due tot he weight of the brick border the entire thing sank two full bricks in. this was both a good and bad thing because it wasn't too deep but also it still meant I had to carefully get a trenching shovel under the deepest layer to get them out.

 

The next step now all the bricks have been removed was to install the new raised bed kit. This is part of why I did extra measurements, I needed to know what the internal and external area of the bed was to make sure the raised bed kit would fit and what you see with that small amount of gap is exactly what you want.

 

The bed has been back filled with a mix of soil and mushroom compost in this picture.

 

 

This is the final product, hanging baskets, and the whole nine yards.

 

 

 

 

The Garden Tour 2026 Part II

 

          On the blog for a few weeks we’re taking a break from the Fort Liberty series to talk about an event that happened in June.  There was an event at the Trial gardens, garden tour which is a yearly event held in the spring. You can see the full details of what the tour is, when it is held and other information about it on the July 16^th post at the link below.

 

https://bl2-litfm.blogspot.com/2026/07/the-garden-tour-2026.html

 

Today we’re going to take a look at the reconstruction of the vegetable patch, which is an area dedicated to producing food by way of annual or biennial vegetables and fruit. During the summer it has historically produced Cucumbers, Tomatoes, Eggplant, Basil, Cowpeas, and Elephant Garlic. During the cold months its specialty is Cole crops such as Broccoli, Cauliflower, Collards, Kale, Arugula and, Radishes. Also this area has been used to produce Carrots and Celery. The bed however had a persistent issue with soil erosion and the encroachment of non-hybrid Bermuda grass and shoots form the neighbor’s Tree of Heaven. The soil erosion was the big problem because if I could not keep good soil in place, then any irrigation I did was less effective since what soil remained was not holding on to the water long enough to support my vegetable crops. The Vegetable bed was the first area to be upgraded as part of the plan to renovate ahead of the Garden Tour. The following series of pictures will show you what I did so that you can decide if it is something you would consider doing in your garden.

 

The first step is always measuring your area and then drawing up a plan. Each bed was six feet long by 3 feet and eight inches wide, and although not marked the area in between them is about two and a half feet wide. Because the modular raised bed kids have rounded corners in later planning sketches you'll see shadowed hard corners indicating negative space.

 

This is what it looked like before I started work. Only the four poles the surviving collard plants, the group of chicory plants and the nearly-buried paving stones in the middle indicate this was productive last year.

 

After the weeds and unwanted plants were cleared, the remaining amounts of decent soil were run through a compost sifter and put on the blue tarp. Some folks would not bother with this but I believe that in the sand hills even gray colored soil that doesn't look great is still better as a sub soil in a raised bed then buying bags of questionable topsoil at a place like Home Despot.

 

 

The excavated soil is then covered with a plastic sheet and the entire amount is covered to keep it dry while the rest of the preparation work is underway.

 

Once the first two raise bed kits are assembled, they are placed where the old vegetable beds used to be and the soil under the tarp is added. The two large pots off to the side are tree pots and they once contained annual crops that are now dead. The large pot's soil is added to the mix since it counts as being potentially near depletion. In the time between this picture and the last, I have cut down a Cattle Panel fence section, and you will be surprised at what I did with it.

 

Ultra Gross! Looks like my Sourdough recipe has gone horribly astray! Jokes aside, this is a storage tote full of stored Mushroom compost. It's sat in there for months and was set aside specifically for this very moment. The white stuff is fungi, but so is the  gray stuff. The liquid is from a process called Guttation, in which the very much alive fungi push out excess water  through their pores. Since this was in a sealed storage tote the extra moisture cant go anywhere and forms the yellow pools. It's harmless but mushroom compost that looks like this is worth it's weight in gold as a soil amendment and as a fertilizer.

 

The compost is hacked up to bits in my trusty wheelbarrow, and then distributed equally in both beds. It is a nutrient rich cap for the subsoil layer and in fall the mushrooms may emerge and produce caps.

 

Over the mushroom Compost is a fresh layer of potting soil straight from the 72 liter bag. The type I use is just soil, no wetting agents, no fertilizer, no additives. 

 

The Cattle Panel Arch is installed in the middle of the filling process to make sure the support rods and everything holding it in the earth is deep enough. After that one bed is fully topped off with Potting soil and then the other which is unfinished in the picture gets the same soil treatment.

 

Now for the planting, take a look at the next two pictures for closeups.

 

 

Here's the right side, and from the bottom left: Fern Leaf Yarrow, Lavender, Elephant Garlic, Green Fennel, Patio Baby Eggplant, Marigolds, Cherokee Purple Tomato, Cucumbers, Yellow Salad Onions, Sweet Basil, Green Fennel, Orange You Sweet Pepper, Brandywine Tomato, Summer Squash.

 

The left side bed, plants from lower left: Lamb's Ear, Lemon Thyme, Mounding Blue Rue, Marigolds, Dandelion, Patio baby Eggplant, Green Fennel, Lemon Cherry Tomato, Yellow Salad Onions, Cucumbers, Sweet Basil, Lemon Cherry Tomato, Orange You Glad Peppers, Green Fennel, Summer Squash.

 

Just as I thought I was done, Polka who is one of the farm cats reminded me I forgot to put the pine straw out and put back the pavers.

 

This is how it looked when finished.

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.