Past Experience

We live in this urban area, about six blocks from here. I worked for the Downtown Council last year in it's first year of greening the downtown. This is a bed I would rework as part of my job with that organization.

This was my set up: After putting down a plastic tarp to keep the dirt off the sidewalk, I pulled the border grass and extra holly bushes. I pruned and re-arranged the holly bushes. I used the small bypass shears, I think they are called, for the pruning. I used a three-point shovel to cut back the nandinas and to dig and cultivate the bed. This all turned out to be back breaking. A garden spade would have been the best thing to use. My hand also took a beating from the long use of the by-pass shears.

My job was to get the beds cultivated and ready for planting annuals. I worked under the direct supervision of a competent landscape architect. I learned some good stuff doing this. I learned I would rather be a gardener than a painter.

I left the beds with the soil raked smooth and loose enough to a depth of 8" so that the landscapers could just stick the annual plants right in the ground by hand. It involved moving some of the holly bushes and re-planting the border. This created two flower beds; One bed on the street side and one bed on the sidewalk side, with the Youpan holly in between. The holly greened right back out.
This bed took me about 10 hours to get straight.

I went by this bed yesterday to take a picture for this post and found it in poor shape. Then, as now I felt the work should have been more gradual and sure. Take it one bed at a time and put it in shape, irrigation and all. Then tend it daily. At the time the irrigation did not work in these beds. It took a couple of weeks for an irrigation company to get the irrigation up and running. In the mean time I had to water all these beds by hand, something that took four hours to do, most every day, in addition to my other duties.
My opinion is that the organization got greedy and bit off more than they could chew. They started off with a grand hurrah, but now the project appears shipwrecked, and after only one year. Too much big talk and public relations and too little doing. Talk is cheap. I felt used; prostituted. A couple of weeks later I was digging a bed further up the street when something popped in my lower spine and my life changed forever. Now this bed I gave myself to with great enthusiasm is so poor that I don't have the heart to photograph and show it here. If you are going to do something like this it has to be maintained and tended and encouraged to grow like a baby. Care has to be given to it continually or soon it will show neglect.