Pic helps a bunch. Your raised beds look good, and looking at the far one it looks like you used the plastic only on the sides where the wood is. So I don't see a problem with the plastic. You simply have raised beds, not containers. At 8" depth the cardboard is unnecessary. You can just pile the dirt into the beds on the grass, on the grass will be smothered. At 8" in the near term it will limit your root depth, and may cause problems with deeper rooting plants and roots veg's. If it were mine, I'd take it out. With the soil on top of the underlying turf, it will settle over time as the grass underneath decomposes. My experience with St. Augustine is that settling will be ~ 1". With the cardboard the settling will be a bit more, maybe 1.5". Now, the grass -- it looks like you're in Cocoa Beach (zip code), and the turf looks like a very decent stand of St. Augustine. Your problem with the grass won't be the stuff in the beds that gets smothered, it will be the stuff on the outside that comes right up to the edges. It will try to find a way into those beds, and usually St. Augustine is successful (if there's any Bermuda in there it tends to be even more invasive). I would encourage to develop a turf-free zone around those beds. There are many options. On the soil - since you're dealing with uncomposted horse manure, I would suggest no more than 1" of that per bed. Add it on top of a base soil fill in the beds, then mix in in well, trying to get it distributed through the entire 8" depth. The base soil in those beds would ideally be a loam or sandy loam, if you can get it. Being in Cocoa Beach I suspect your base soil is rather sandy. You could use that (if you have some to move) along with some compost and the horse manure, but you'll probably have better luck with bringing in new soil. Check landscape supplies in your yellow pages. Final point - exposure. Don't know when that picture was taken, but the beds are in complete shade. Where do those beds sit relative to the fence -- west side, east side, etc, and what is the direction of the fence line (N/E/S/W)? The good news is you're in the beginning so with just a bit of work you can get it right and enjoy some great growing. Since you are using raw manure I would encourage you to heed to 90/120 day before harvest recommendations. Someone getting sick because you were in a hurry just isn't worth it. Be patient. Since we're already into May, and you're way down there in south FL, your timing is really good for fall planting. This post was edited by TXEB on Sun, May 12, 13 at 15:23

i have no problem deferring on z6 planting times .... but that was not my real point .... i am picturing this tree.. smaller than a pencil ... and how you protect them in 8 separate locations around the garden .... my point was .. all grouped together.. protection is easy .... and then there is the winter dryness ... if applicable... can you keep these SIX INCH BABES properly watered all winter long???? ... or would they be better protected otherwise .... are you z6'ers ... suggesting that a 6 month old.. 6 inch tree.. is equivalent to a pot grown or ball and burlap.. tree of say 3 to 5 years old .... 3 to 5 feet tall ... ???? though i usually lecture peeps that plants are not their babies ... in this case.. THESE ARE LITERALLY BABIES ... and i will stick to protecting them .. this winter ... if you plant .. get rid of any media.. bare root and plant in native soil .... do you have snow cover all winter????? good luck ken ps: best solution.. experiment .... plant 4 .. store 4 .... see what happens ....

Like others, we will be installing most of our old wall cabinets in our garage for storage around DH's work bench. However, I will be salvaging the following: 1) old wooden pullouts to use in the garage base cabinets, after a nice application of WD-40 to ease the 30-year-old squeaky metal slides; 2) metal breadboxes (to store extra dog food in the garage storeroom safe from the little roof rats that sometimes find their way inside the house); 3) shelving material and shelf supports from all of the wall and base cabinets that will be going into the dumpster. I know that I will want more shelves than come with my new wall cabinets, so I will use the old shelving material to play with different interior layouts until I find the right configurations for my "stuff". Once I'm settled on the perfect shelf arrangements, then I'll order the permanent shelves from the cabinet manufacturer.

We have a lot of clay here too, it's really a pain when you go through a drought followed by heavy rains because it can move a lot under those conditions. If the decking is demo'd they can indeed drill dowels into the pool walls, it won't affect the plaster because they're drilling into the back side of the walls. Unless they use a bit that is too long and it goes all the way through! Here are some pics so you can see what I'm describing, in this first picture they've set the steel and about every 36" they left a rod extending vertically. They will later be bent down and will be cast into the decking. In this picture you can see that they've bent the bars down and then placed additional reinforcing for the deck over them. This was after it had rained and the bars were partially into the sand, but before the decking was poured the bars were placed on chairs to raise them above the sand. Ideally the reinforcing should be centered in the decking slab. You can also see in this picture where they installed dowels into the existing sidewalk in the bottom of the picture. They drilled into the sidewalk and installed dowels about every 36". This is similar to what they should have done on your flatwork. This is a finished pic, mainly to show the mastic joints. There should be a mastic joint between the flatwork and pool coping, and also between the new decking and existing decking or sidewalks (if there are any). In our case you can see (barely) a mastic joint on the backside of the coping and also where the decking meets the existing sidewalk (existing sidewalk is to the right, it's a slightly darker color).