Digging in the Garden

This weekend provided the perfect weather for digging in the garden. I love these little Spring teasers in the middle of Winter, though they do tend to leave me a bit depressed and yearning for warmer days.

Here is the mess of a garden after our day of hard work. A couple weeks ago we dug out the top left bed, and this weekend I finished digging out the bottom left bed. The soil was nice and soft from the recent rain, which made digging easier, but it made separating the long grass roots from the heavy wet clay a very difficult task.



We covered the finished beds with plastic to sterilize the soil. This method is supposed to kill any bacteria, weeds and bugs living in the soil via suffocation. It also keeps the water out, which sounds bad, but prevents the freshly dug soil from becoming compacted by heavy rains. I don't want to dig that soil twice this year!



Ian has been burning garden refuse and old rotten wood in the unfinished beds while I dig out the other beds. The ash provides potassium to the soil and also softens it, which makes digging a lot easier. The bed where we grew tomatoes last year used to be the burn bed for generations of previous owners, and the tomatoes were very successful, so we figured we would burn in each of the beds to see if we could reproduce these same results throughout the entire garden.



We are going to build 10' x 10' wooden garden boxes for each of the four beds this year. We are also going to lay down garden cloth on the paths between the beds and cover them with mulch in an attempt to stave off the grass. I had a terrible time keeping the grass out of the garden beds last year! We will need to outline the entire garden with plastic edging in order to keep the grass from invading the pathways. This is going to be quite an endeavor, but I hope it will provide a permanent solution and keep us from having to dig the grass out of the beds every year.

Seriously, look at this mess. I don't want to have to dig the grass ever again!



Since we will be spending what seems like a million dollars building garden beds and lining the pathways, I was hoping to spend no money this year on compost, peat or cow manure. The compost tumbler was supposed to provide me with a constant source of lush FREE compost all year long! It has not performed all that well though. I am hoping the cold weather has stunted its ability to compost, but we'll see when Summer rolls around if it performs any better. This batch has been brewing for 4 weeks, so it should be finished, but it's got another 4 weeks at least before all that grass is broken down.



I was digging the bottom left quadrant, disgusted by the heavy red clay and thinking about the fact that I would have to spend another fortune on peat to improve the soil when Ian announced that he found a bunch of compost up in the corner of the yard. I thought he was joking. Compost doesn't just appear out of no where, right? He was not joking! He had found the motherload of compost, just sitting there waiting to be discovered! Apparently he has been dumping grass clippings in the same spot for the past two years, and they turned into compost! It's magic people!

Here is the pile after having removed four wheelbarrows full. I was able to dump two wheelbarrows on each of the two garden beds that have already been dug up, and I think there are 4 more wheelbarrows worth left for the other two garden beds! Oh, it was so sweet! I also used some compost when I repotted the fern. I hope it gave him the energy boost he needed to stimulate his growth. Oh beautiful compost, how you have made my gardening day!



I am hoping there is more compost under this heap of garden trash too. Ian has reminded me though that we dumped the gravel from the perennial bed in this spot, so even if there is compost, it might be difficult to access. The evil gravel strikes again!

See My Garden!

Here are some shots of the garden. You can click the picture to get a better view.

This is the "big picture" view of the garden in early May. The garden is separated into four 9'x9' quadrants, with a 2' path between each.



The Top Left Quadrant is growing spinach, peas, pole beans and corn. The Marigolds are there for my Grandpa who loved Marigolds and also claimed they help keep critters out of the garden. The squirrels are having a field day in there despite the Marigolds, so I think Poppy might have been wrong about that :) All the plants are doing well except the spinach, which seems to hate the warm weather. I think I will plant it earlier next year. I'm going to try the spinach again when it gets closer to Fall.



The Top Right Quadrant is growing lettuce, tomatoes and basil. There are 14 tomato plants! I read that basil helps deter bugs like aphids, so I interplanted the basil with the tomatoes in an attempt to protect them from infestations. This is the spot that used to be the "burn pit," so it is supercharged with nitrogen. The lettuce LOVES the nitrogen. All the plants are doing great in this area.



The Bottom Left Quadrant is growing carrots, onions, broccoli, peppers, edamame, cilantro and sage. The broccoli, peppers and cilantro still have their paper cup caps on to protect against cut worms. This patch of soil gave us the most trouble since the grass did not want to die. We tilled it, hoed it, raked it, sprayed it, covered it and repeated, and yet the grass continued to grow back. It's pretty weed-free now, but I do see some little buggers starting to poke up through! These plants have only been in the ground for 2 weeks, but I think they're doing OK. The carrots and onions were just planted a week ago, and they haven't sprouted up yet. Yes, they're late getting planted, but the first batch was no good and I had to resow!



The Bottom Right Quadrant is growing squash, cucumbers, melons and potatoes. The potatoes are growing like C-R-A-Z-Y! The squash are also doing very well. The cucumbers and melons haven't been planted long, so it's hard to say how they're doing. I think they're doing good though.



Here is a closer look at the corn. I need to thin it out, but it hurts my feelings to pull up the plants! I will do it though ... otherwise all the corn will die from overcrowding, and we can't have that!



Here is a view of the peas (L) and beans (R). The peas are a lot bigger, because they were sown before the last frost, but the beans cannot take frost, so they were sown just a couple weeks ago. We made this trellis from bamboo stakes and chicken wire. The stakes were just $4 for 12 at K-Mart. No, I don't usually shop at K-Mart, but it is the closest store to us, and when you're in a hurry, even K-Mart will do.



A closer look at the tomatoes and lettuce. This picture was taken just last week, but the plants have all grown since then! They are doing very well in this nitrogen-rich area. I hope the tomatoes bear healthy fruit. Nitrogen is used to produce great greenery, and phosphorous promotes good fruit development. I have fertilized with 10-10-10, so hopefully they're getting enough phosphorous too! The tomatoes are staked with the same bamboo stakes that were used to build the trellis. These bamboo stakes are very nice in the garden! That lettuce will be ready to eat next week.

Graham Blandy - Not so Bland ...

Ian brought the Graham Blandy shrubs safely back from Laurel Springs, and I think the trip was well worth it. We cultivated the bed and enriched it with manure, peat and top soil and finally got the shrubs planted. Lining them up was a real chore. They are currently around 6 feet tall and will grow to be 10-12 feet tall at the rate of 1 foot per year. They won't get much wider though. I think they're the perfect shrub for the job, and they're also quite unique, as I have not seen anything like them around here. The picture isn't so great, because it was taken with a camera phone and there are some pretty hard shadows obstructing the view.

The Knockout Roses are shipping this week, so the fun in the front yard is almost over ... thank goodness.

We're not sure what to do about the hose in the right flower bed. It's really an eye sore.

The New and Improved Flowerbox

Here it is ... the new and improved flower box ... wider, deeper and better constructed than the old one (which is currently sitting on the burn pile). Ian did a good job assembling it, and the paint is a perfect match with the shutters! The paint department woman at Lowes took a long time to get it right, but she matched the sample wonderfully. (They have a nifty computer that scans the sample and squirts the proper dye into the paint, but it's not 100% accurate and took some fiddling around with.) We don't have it attached to the wall properly yet, so it is still empty. It has been really cold here the past two weekends. I am hoping it will warm up so this project can be stamped Finished.