Mandala Keyhole Garden

Here comes the design -- the moment you've all been waiting for! 

As anyone who knows me has probably figured out, I detest straight lines in the landscape. Circles and curvy irregular shapes will always appeal to me more than straight lines and rectangles. They have a more organic feel that I love, and are often be a more efficient use of space, too. I wanted to design a feature garden that would incorporate a wide variety of edible annual and perennial plants. A circular garden with a keyhole pathway is a shape that I've been thinking about for a while, and that simple design has an almost spiritual feel to me, in a way that's hard to describe. When I saw a mandala design in Toby Hemenway's book Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, I knew that was what I wanted to implement:

Thankfully Caera and Kate approved of my wild idea to turn this dream into a reality. So after weeding over 1,200 sq ft of land and marking the outlines of the beds, Kate and I got to work building the walls of the interior raised bed.

This was our first time constructing a dry stack stone wall. I enjoyed the process of selecting rocks and trying fit them together. And it's a really great feeling to finish that first keyhole! I'm so excited about this garden. It's gonna take a lot of hard work, but Kate and I are motivated.

This is the completed rock wall of the inside bed, which will be slightly higher than that outer bed (for aesthetic and practical/material reasons). When we started filling the bed, we first added cardboard, alder branches, small logs, and a year's worth of kitchen scraps to save on soil. 

Stay tuned for more updates.