Recovering Old Beds.

Three years ago I had my beds laid out on 4' centers.  The idea was that I'd have 2 1/2' beds and 1 1/2' paths.  That mostly worked.  I'd like to go back to that area and plant it again.  It's basically been three years since I paid it any attention though.  There was a row of trellises where I had tomatoes, and some beds of garlic that never got harvested.  I thought I'd lost the garlic to the weeds, but it turns out I haven't.  Once I raked off the dead grasses, I see clumps of garlic growing in the pattern I planted it in.  A couple weeks ago they looked like this:

I was able to tease most of these apart, and if I really wanted to plant more, I could from this stock.  But it will be easier to do that in the fall when it can be harvested and split into cloves without worrying about small roots.

So today I got to work laying out the beds again, and the garlic acted as a landmark.  The first and third beds on the right as you enter the garden both have some of this legacy garlic in them.  I cut myself some wooden stakes from some pallet boards I had laying around, lined up one on each end of the first bed with the edge of the garlic planting, and used that as the baseline to measure from.  They aren't all dug, but I marked out 12 beds in sections 13 and 14 of the old garden map.

The first three beds look like this, looking south from the middle east-west garden path:

The brighter green visible in the first bed on the right is garlic.  There's more in the third bed, between the white string and the black hose on the left.  So the second bed is empty and needs the grass dealt with.  

Rhizome grass is my worst weed.  There was one year I tried carefully pulling out every bit, and it took me forever.  One year I went out early and was turning over a few clumps of weeds with a shovel and I pulled something and tore the erector spinae muscle from the iliac crest on one side of my lower back.  This year I've been doing my recreational ditch digging where I want the foundation of my cottage to be.  I think it's toned up my back muscles nicely.  And based on past experience, I'm not going overboard.  I'm turning the soil once, and then I'll go through it a couple times with the three toothed cultivator, pulling what I can, and then I'll rake it and plant stuff.  That's basically what I did under that low tunnel a week ago.

Bed 2 there is basically 100 square feet.  It's 40' x 2 1/2'.  It took me almost exactly a half hour to turn it with a shovel.  

I'm thinking it looks like a good spot for a few rows of beets.  I've got about two or three weeks until normal last frost.  In that time I'd like to get all twelve of these marked beds ready to plant.