Winter Mulch

Neighborhood cut down a tree, and was chipping up the branches. I decided it was the right time to mulch the garden.

Last year's mulch had mostly composted except the top inch. 

The front two beds needed more depth. I scraped off the top inch of chips, added an inch of fresh compost and another inch of well-mulched chips before adding a couple of inches of fresh chips on top.

All other beds got a topping of fresh chips over their existing chips; between 1" and 3" depending on the bed. 

It's going to be interesting to see how seeds and plants do in this environment.

Heroes of the 2020 Garden

• Tomatoes (Limit cherries to baskets/pots next year.)

• Peppers

• Rhubarb (as usual)

• Zucchini (Don’t plant them again: the chickens got ‘em all.)

• Raspberries

• Carrots were hard to get started, but eventually did very well. 

• Onions did well eventually

  • Lettuce

• Kale (of course)

• Garlic

• Lemons. My little tree gave me two dozen.

• Got a dozen or so baby fish in the fish pond before the heron got the adults.  

Things to cage for 2021

• Winter squash only.

• More flowers.

• Make room for asparagus.

• Add cantaloupe.

• Hot peppers in large pots (3 gallon or so)

July Fourth Update

Progress report for the beginning of Summer.

A lot of good things growing. I pruned the raspberries hard over the winter. They are doing very well.

This is one of the beds that did not get the fresh compost dug-in, so it didn't like starting seeds. The lettuce and carrots are store bought starts. The peas, cucumbers, celery our homegrown starts

The garlic has been growing since last fall, but this spring, I added the peppers To The Ends. Garlic is nearly ready for harvesting. Pepper's doing okay.

This big bed is something of a miscellaneous bed this year. I did get the compost dug in on this, so it handles seeds really well. We have, clockwise from the West, last year's Swiss chard, fresh lettuce, orange marigolds, last year's onions for seed, German carrots, red onions for seed, Beats, another batch of lettuce, spinach just starting down in front here, a great big sunflower, from a weed, several cucumbers, and a couple of peppers.

The cucumbers are worth some attention. I put up a trellis for them this year. Some of them made it up the trellis. Some starts didn't thrive. And some starts are growing on the ground. But I like the trellis idea. I will do this again. 

Tomatoes are doing really well. Every year, I tell myself that I'm not going to overcrowd the tomatoes. Every year I decide I need lots of tomatoes. So I overcrowd every year. Sigh.

One kale plant along the side, for the chickens.

The Brassica bed was interesting. This one did not get the compost dug-in oh, so it was hostile to seeds and very young starts. The cabbage, broccoli, kale was from store-bought starts. Sad. The Swiss chard on this end is a local start. On the far end AR green onions, and I'm growing some brussel sprouts seeds.

I have a great this year. I got a cutting from a seedless concord grape from a friend. But see how this grows.

This bed was full of asparagus last year. This year only one asparagus came up. Very disappointing. Planted several more asparagus roots. Only two of those came up.

But because the asparagus was here, I couldn't dig in the top level of compost oh, so it didn't work well for seeds.

We had a number of tomato plants show up as weeds. So I'm putting those in here. I also have some leftover peas starts, and some marigolds at the end. And one carrot.

Lemon tree is doing well this year. I've harvested three lemons so far this year, there are six or eight more. Lots of new growth.

Of course, this spends its winters in the greenhouse.

The squash bed. All starts our local oh, but you can tell which ones were put out too early. I've already started harvesting zucchinis. Note to self. Don't put squash out until late May. Celery on the ends.

These last bed. Rhubarb is taking over the world. How to have Peas on a trellis, cucumbers on another color, some of which are doing better than others.

 Lots of containers next to the greenhouse this year. Tomatoes and peppers. One ground cherry. Cement in baskets. Some kale growing for seed.

Mulch For the Garden

  I've been concerned about the soil in my garden this year. I added a fresh a couple of inches of compost to most of raised beds this spring.

A couple of the beds had something growing in them, so I couldn't dig the compost into the existing soil there.

 

And it turns out that a couple of inches of compost on top of good soil isn't actually a good thing. Seeds wouldn't germinate in those beds. I planted some starts, sometimes the same variety as the failed seeds, and they grew just great. It's Not unusual for me to keep things growing all winter long in three or four of the beds.

 

So that got me thinking of other ways to improve my soil.

 

A secondary issue was with the top of the soil drying out, while the soil underneath stayed nice and moist. So some beds were getting over watered, while shallow-rooted plants would dry out.

 

The third issue is the common enemy of gardens. Weeds. I wanted to try to minimize the number of weeds that got started.

So I am mulching with wood chips. I put down a layer of pretty fine mulch: a mix of sawdust, sand, grass clippings, and a little compost, maybe half an inch.

 

Then I am adding wood chips over the top. It seems important that these are what I call full range wood chips, not all one size, but the full branch or the full tree, chipped up. There is a place in town where I can get a lot of these chips, if I'm willing to haul them myself. So I did.

 

In several of the beds with larger plants, Tomatoes, squashes, garlic etc, I added three or four inches of wood chips.

The idea is that over time, the wood chips on the bottom will compost, adding to the quality of the soil, keeping it loose for the plants. 

 

The top of the chips, being in the sun and weather, will compost much more slowly, giving stray weed seeds no room to germinate. 

 

When I plant seeds and starts next spring, I will dig down to the top of the actual soil, and plant them there. I have already planted several tomato starts (these were weeds that grew up throughout the gardens) in the chips on one of the beds. Seems to work pretty well.

 

So I have added the chips to about half of the beds. This winter, I will add chips to the rest of the beds. But I wanted to give them a head start on composting.

 

I have one compost bin full of chips, with the idea that it would break down a little over the next few months. I decided I needed to help the process some.

 

So I mixed those chips with fresh compost. That compost is about 1/3 grass clippings, 1/3 used pine chips from the chicken coop, and 1/3 soil from the top of the chicken yard. It's pretty rich.

 

So I've mixed all that together, and it's going to compost for the rest of the summer, and the fall. I'm expecting that it will do pretty nicely for garden beds mulch.

 

And just to be thorough, I added a couple of scoops of red worms from the worm bin. I'm not sure they will survive, but if they do, they will expedite the breakdown of these chips.

 

In future years, all I should need to do is add another inch or two of chips on the top of the beds. We'll see how well that works.

Quarantine Gardening

So everybody needs to stay at home. But it's spring. And I have a garden. So let's make use of that. Here's what went in this weekend.

Romaine lettuce on the left. Black nebula carrots on the right. They're really dark purple carrots, and I've never grown them before, and they look really cool in the package. I thought I would give them a try.

I'm trying something new with the radishes. I'm having trouble, year after year, with slugs eating the seedlings.

But I have noticed that the slugs don't like kale. So I have planted this bit full of radishes, with kale planted around the perimeter. 

I don't know that I'll keep the kale. I have a pint Jar full of kale seeds, collected from last year.

The wire frame in the middle of this is for cucumbers, which won't get planted for at least a month. They will, theoretically, climb up this trellis to the archway overhead.

This will be the Brassica bed. The far-right are seedlings of Swiss chard, various colors. Then the red cups are protecting the kale, except that half The kale is outside the cups and the slugs aren't even touching it. Aha! 

Behind the compost bin, between the compost and the fence, is what would otherwise be wasted space. We can't have wasted space. So I spread some flower seeds, a variety of sunflowers and a variety of nasturtiums. We'll see what happens with that. These two varieties are generally pretty maintenance-free.

Update: this is a month later. 

Starting Carrots

This spring, I got a package of carrot seeds from Germany. Exciting!

So it seems that all the carrot seedlings got stuck in one place. 

The instructions said to soak the seeds in wet sand through four or five days first. 

I've never heard of that, but it clearly helped them germinate well! But the sand also helped them stick together. That's probably not best. 

So today I transplanted 100 carrot seedlings or so. I'm told that you can't transplant carrots. Seemed to work OK.

Update: the transplants did well.

It's Daylight Savings. Must Garden!

Planted Swiss Chard this weekend.

Package said, "Plant January through March."

















Had some kale starts. Set them out. Probably too early for these, not because of the calendar, but because they're too little. We'll see.
















Planted some peas. Sugar snaps.


















Set out some lettuce starts. Some Romaine, some Butter Crunch.

















Didn't do anything to the rhubarb, but it's coming up.

Winterizing the Garden

Winterizing the garden beds.

Winter Rye and maple leaf mulch. There's some red clover in there, too, but I think the mulch may have overwhelmed it.

I like how it looks.

A Retrospective

First experiment with raised beds started in 2010. It made for many jokes about graveyards, but it also sure made gardening easier.









Note that this is regular hem-fir. We refused to use treated lumber. (That treatment is poison; we didn't favor growing our family's food in the midst of poison.)








Didn't use cedar because cedar's expensive! And it isn't really suitable for direct burial.










2011 saw the addition of chips between the beds.











Good results in the garden, while we built the greenhouse. Also 2011.









2012:  I doubled the height of the raised beds, added a couple of inches of really dry meadow muffins, and watered the garden. I'll dig it into the dirt later.











2013  saw the demise of the flowering plum that shaded the west end of the garden.

Miss that tree (and that tree house). Used the stump for a fireplace while we burned it out.
















2018: all the wood beds have pretty well rotted by now. We're gradually replacing them with galvanized steel on top of cinder blocks.








This brought the working height up to old-guy range. We had to buy a lot of dirt, which means we had to shovel a lot of dirt, which is awfully good exercise.

Seems to work pretty well.

One bed to go: when the garlic is ready, we'll harvest it and replace the remains of that wood with cinder blocks and galvanized steel, and the upgrades will be done.

The Garden in June

It's June now, and the garden is filling out nicely. It looks full, but there's not much (except salad) that's ready to eat now.

The stock tanks are amazing. Far easier to work with.

There are three avocado trees; no fruit on these yet. The olive and lemons are looking very promising!


The trellis for the peas is getting quite bushy. I'm eager for them to ripen. Kind of a neat entry into the garden.










Herb garden, part one.

That's our picnic table back in there, right behind the basil bed.

Sage on the far end, next to the blueberry bush. That blueberry is doing remarkably poorly this year. Every time it rains, the busted gutter drains a lot of the water on top of the berry; that may be a problem. That's on the honeydo list this year.

This is the second part of the herb garden. The plants in the ground are herbs.

Hanging, we have some herbs, some nasturtiums (spicy!), some tomatoes (not ripe yet), and some cucumbers.


















This is the new patio behind the garage. Making use of the small space.

I was concerned that the pomegranate tree had died. It's coming back. We put the wood on the chain link gate to keep the wind from whipping through there. I think that helped it freeze last winter.

Kiwis growing on the fence, sunflowers up against it. Tomatoes in the hanging pots, more herbs in the pots on the shelf on the fence. 

I've been experimenting with trying to add flowers around the edges. We'll see how that goes. I'll certainly need to water much of that, but it should be worth it.

Inside the greenhouse, things are calmer than earlier in the spring. All the 'maters and squashes are out. The pepper bed is doing well; I have a couple of cucumbers growing around the peppers in there, and a couple of tomatoes in the back.

I'll probably keep starting things far too long into the year. It's just so interesting! Currently, I have four mystery seeds going, and some giant asparagus things from a seed pod I found in a public garden.