This week we officially kicked off the garden renovation. There’s no turning back now!

This is Tuesday morning, before we started working. The plants look sad, but they were still productive.

If it was green and growing, we pretty much pulled it out on Tuesday. There were A LOT of peppers and green tomatoes on those plants.

Case in point. I know you don’t see any peppers in this picture, but trust me. Most of those bags are full of peppers. It was pepper palooza!

I could be wrong, but I think we might need another compost bin. Just maybe.

This is as things were winding down yesterday morning. All the rest of those bricks and blocks are gone now. All that’s left is some of the trash lumber, the wheelchair height bed, the table, and the compost area. And a whole bunch of dirt.

Note to self: raised beds do NOT need 2-3′ long pieces of rebar to secure them to the ground. Really, they don’t. Not even in Kansas.

It was pretty cool to see the root remnants of the plants we pulled on Tuesday. This root system is from the pepper garden. I guess we did a decent job of watering, because the roots seem to go all the way to the bottom of the raised bed area and even a little deeper.

We also realized just how important (and nice) all the drainage work is as a component of the renovation. After not having rain for ages, then 2″ over the weekend, there was water standing in the packed clay 12-24″ inches below the surface. When we pulled the demonstration table out, we saw it had literally been standing in water. Yuck!