March 12th, 2013. I did a fair bit of work in the garden this weekend. I started by topping up the soil in all of the raised beds. It took a full cubic yard altogether. Lot of shoveling.
I used the Garden Mix from Western Soils: 1/3 manure, 2/3 topsoil, or so. Pretty rich.
The soil in the raised beds had settled a fair bit during the last couple of years.
That's partly because soil settles, and partly because I filled the bottoms of the raised beds with scrap wood; an attempt at hugelkultur: a permaculture technique that involves branches and wood under the soil, decomposing, for long-term enrichment of the soil.
Before I filled the bins, I removed the things growing there (well, most of them). In the process, I found a whole bunch of red onion starts. I think one of my red onion flowers last year went to seed before I got to it and this spring, I have scads of little baby red onion starts!
I was terrifically excited to find all these free onion starts, and my favorite onions at that! So I planted all the volunteer onion starts, and some of the Walla Walla Sweet Onion starts that I'd been working on all winter in the greenhouse. We'll see how well they do.
After two days of shoveling and raking, I looked into what could be planted already.
I've always waited until later for a lot of my spring gardening, but several seeds said, "Plant as early as soil can be worked." And I'd clearly been working the soil. So I planted some things.
Four rows of things here. The first was supposed to be radishes, but when I planted them, it turns out they were beet seeds. Whoops. Well, they're both red, found root crops, aren't they?
Then carrots, then more beets (on purpose this time) and finally, some actual radishes.
I also planted a row of sugar snap peas (I soaked the seeds for a day in advance). Actually, I laid the (soaked) seeds on the soil, and added the new soil on top.
Yesterday, I had dug into the soil under that space and added both blood meal and bone meal. Hoping for good peas again. Excellent for friends and family grazing opportunities.
Note that the first bed in the back has been growing garlic all winter. I added to it (there was some elephant garlic among the little onion starts, rescued from the other beds).
I've also got some Swiss chard growing on the near end of this bed: it's been out and under cover for a week or more (with one out from under cover), and they seem to be doing pretty well.
There's one Romaine lettuce under cover at the other end of the bed; been there for a week, too.
Mid-winter, we'd discovered some red potatoes growing in a dark cupboard. I stuck those in dirt, hoping they'd survive and maybe grow. They're growing well.
