Vegetable Garden Construction

JD and I opted out of having a vegetable garden last year - which turned out to be a good thing considering our Sturgis adventure. This year I decided to give it a shot. I wasn't sure that the area where JD had had a garden in previous years was getting enough sun so we tried a new location in the middle of the property near the orchard.

The downside to the area is that it's pretty gravelly and in fact, the area in the middle where the old house used to be is thickly covered in large rocks so we decided to build several garden boxes (which we probably would have done anyway). I'm planning to build a greenhouse eventually and I think those large black rocks will be a good base for it - they'll allow for good drainage and hold some heat, too. JD is gradually scraping those back for me to where I want to locate the greenhouse.

Two sides were already fenced well enough but the other sides needed some attention. And all four sides needed something to deter deer. We installed fencing on one side, repaired and supplemented the other and installed extensions around the top. I used several pieces of PVC (salvaged from a duck blind JD had built several years ago but no longer used) and some conduit we found in the barn. I attached these to all the t-posts and fence posts and ran three rows of wire around the perimeter to a height of eight feet.

We rearranged the garden boxes a little, filled them up with lovely new four part compost and started planting.

Clockwise from top left: potatoes, beefsteak tomatoes and cilantro, tomatoes and basil, pear tomatoes

Pickling cucumbers and peppers:

This box ended up being a little crowded with parsnip, dill, carrots, onions, tomatoes and one beet:

Near the back side of the garden is a raised area with a rock wall. In the middle is a hazelnut tree and another unidentified tree. It makes for a nice little shady sitting area. After extensive weeding, I'll plant flowers on the wall and the upper area.

These photos were taken in June. The garden got off to a very slow start but is has picked up in the last month to six weeks. I even got one tomato last week!

Flower Garden

Since our vegetable garden is only limping along, I thought I'd post an update on our flower garden which is doing a little better.

We built a new row of boxes this year and transplanted some perennials from the older boxes - lavender and rosemary and a couple of ground covers. For the most part, those are doing well. One of the rosemary plants was struggling and getting a little leggy but it seems to be recovering slowly.

Over the years, I have collected a pretty good stash of seeds but they were getting old and not doing me any good sitting in my closet. So in April, as an experiment, I tossed a bunch of seeds into all the boxes to see what would happen. Quite a lot it turns out:

The poppy seeds that my mom sent me several years ago were apparently still quite viable (this was after I thinned them about three times.)

The baby's breath turned out to be a good contrast to the lavender.

And I finally got some bachelor's buttons growing, one of my favorites.

I'm going to have do some transplanting and reorganizing of first box though, since I didn't plan for their height and they obscure the lavender somewhat (the foreground of the first photo). I'll probably move the lavender to the end of the box and let the bachelor's buttons fill the center.

Actually, I'm going to have to do some reorganizing all over, I think. Scattering seeds around the boxes was interesting but some of the colors don't necessarily complement each other. The bachelor's buttons and blanket flowers clash

and I definitely have way too much purple - lavender and campanula, mint and lamb's ear (aka goat's ear), even the bachelor's buttons tend to shades of purple. I'm happy that something is growing but still....

I'd like to have some more red flowers. Right now really all I have is one cinquefoil which has lovely dark blood-red flowers. I'd like to find out the best way to propagate it and start a few more.

The poppies from my mom were mixed but I did get a few red ones which I've marked for later seed collection. My friend Alix suggested Flanders poppies, too.

I'm also getting a better idea of the flowering cycles and would like to replant to have constant color in my boxes. The poppies and columbine were early, then bachelors buttons and lavender and, currently, the cinquefoil and blanket flowers are both coming on.

I'd like to get bulbs in, too, for early color. For Valentine's Day this year, JD gave me two pots of red and orange tulips as well as a hyacinth which I've transplanted into the triangle bed in the middle of the driveway. We have a few more miscellaneous bulbs scattered around the property but I'll have to hunt for them a bit since they've died back.

Burn Day

Burn season started later this year - not until October 15. The rainy fall weather is back but we lucked out and had a pretty perfect day on Friday to burn some brush. It only rained a little and there was almost no wind.

This past winter was hard on the trees around here. In January, we had a LOT of snow and we ended up with fallen branches all over the place. We were lucky, though, and our fences weren't damaged. A neighbor down the road had just installed a brand new fence and a tree fell on it not once but twice! He repaired it the first time and then about a month later, another tree fell on it about twenty feet away from the first spot. I felt so bad for him. I'm sure he'll be keeping a close eye on the trees as the weather gets worse.

We'd been collecting brush all year ended up with a pile about half the size of my truck!

We also burned some non-reusable trash lumber leftover from the front porch JD rebuilt earlier this summer. And we started getting rid of the garden boxes that were such a debacle last summer.

A little backstory: The garden boxes are still a sore spot for me. A dollar clothing store listed wooden shipping crates on Craigslist for free. They were about three feet square and three deep. I saw them and thought, "Instant garden boxes!" We hauled about eight of them home and I started painting them. We put three in the garden area and filled the bottom half with bricks and the top with planting soil. They did great for about two months and then everything started with turn yellow and wilt. It was a disaster. I tried less water, more water. We tested the soil but I knew it couldn't be that because it was brand new four-part mix from our regular supplier. I decided that since the boxes were used to ship clothes from god knows what third-world sweatshop to the dollar clothing store from which we got them, they must have been sprayed with some awful pesticide and that was what killed off our plants. Even if they hadn't totally killed off the plants, I'd have been afraid to eat anything that did survive! We put the rest of the boxes on top of on of the blackberry brambles to see what would happen but it didn't really affect them much. (I'm not sure what would have been worse - the blackberries being killed off by whatever was on the boxes or surviving whatever was on them!)

 

I was happy to see those damn boxes turn to ash - and no I don't want to think about those pesticides turning into toxic fumes. I just stayed upwind until they were done.

I know that brush burning isn't very environmentally friendly. In fact, it's probably downright environmentally hostile but I'm not sure there's any other option that is practical or affordable for little farms like ours. And leftover, unusable lumber, well, I don't know where to take that other than the landfill and that's not a great solution either.

I have to admit I also find it very satisfying. A huge mess just goes away in the course of a few hours. And it's very much a fall activity to me. I grew up in rural New Mexico and I still remember Dad collecting tumbleweeds into enormous piles every year. They were very dry by the end of summer, of course, and they'd turn into a crackling bonfire in no time. He'd patiently work away with the pitchfork stacking the brush and weeds into a smaller and smaller pile until everything was gone and the fire was completely out.

The Fire Department regulates our burn season these days. It's evident that they are more concerned with fires spreading than with the environmental aspects. They wait until the fall rain has well and truly arrived before giving the go-ahead to burn. Even though the brush has been sitting all year, it's pretty soggy and needs a little convincing to start. But once it gets going and gets hot enough, even green brush will burn up pretty quickly.

We had planned to rent a woodchipper to make bark dust/wood chips to make the walkways in my flower garden (in between the boxes) but the heavy duty kind that can handle a big branch are expensive. The best is the kind that attaches the the tractor three-point but they are spendy and we just can't manage it this year. I'm hoping that this spring, we can start on it before the weeds get too far along.

Daisy v Mint

In retrospect, planting the oxeye daisy in my garden boxes wasn't my best plan ever.

"Look," I thought. "There's all these pretty daisies growing away so well in our horrible clay soil. I should put a couple in my garden boxes. I'll bet even I couldn't kill them!"

Well, that's the trouble isn't it? Even I couldn't kill them.

And the mint wasn't such a hot idea either.

This pile of mess is from just two of my four by six garden boxes. Mint and oxeye daisy and a good ten pounds of my expensive four-way planting soil!

I'm thinking of adding another box, planting them both and letting them duke it out. It'll be like Celebrity Death Match - Invasive Species Edition!

Except they'll probably get together, put aside their differences and gang up on the other boxes....

I'm just happy to have been able to hobble up to the front and tend to my garden boxes. We build them last summer out of some old fencing we'd gotten off, I think, Craigslist.

They did pretty well this year. This was taken a couple of weeks ago.

We installed a soaker hose before we left for Sturgis and it worked great! The weeds liked it, too, and since I have been laid up, they've gotten totally out of hand.

I spent the better part of two days weeding and weeding and then I weeded some more. I think I'm done for the year but the boxes are going to need some major overhauling in the spring. When we built the boxes, I just planted everything I had from my container garden at my old place just to get them in the ground. Not everything was blooming at the time and I wasn't sure how everything would spread. I figured I'd give them a year to stretch their little roots and see how they looked. I ended up with a lot of purple flowers on plants that spread like crazy.

I want to relocate the mint and daisy, obviously, and spread out the plants so they all have sufficient room. Off to the right, out of the picture, there is room for at least three more boxes. I'm trying to plan the layout for the boxes this time since I know better how the plants will develop. I'd like to showcase the lavenders a little more (my favorites) and give the rosemaries some more room, too (my second favorites). I'd also like to get some reds and whites in the mix as well and maybe some more oranges.

If anyone has suggestions for hardy, red and white and orange perennials, I'd love to hear about them!