My apologies for the long hiatus. This year, as with most seasons in our area, spring kept jumping between “almost summer” and “back to winter”. I lost a tomato plant thanks to that cold snap after Mother’s Day which is considered the last frost date here. Once the weather became consistently warm, all of my free time and toddler nap time has been spent in the yard and not here writing about it.
I planted vegetables and fruit plants, sowed some annual and perennial pollinator friendly flowers, mulched and weeded. And weeded some more. And cursed at the weeds. And weeded again. The gardens got a bit out of control last year due to juggling an infant and working from home during Covid with said infant. The last thing I wanted to do with my free time then was weed and I paid for it this year. In some of the books that I have read about permaculture over the last year have changed my perspective on weeds to an extent. I’ve begun to let the dandelions and the clover stay and I am at peace with their existence now. My worst battle was with the wineberry that took over, I had heard the berries were edible and I briefly considered keeping some but when I inspected it, I saw that it had launched runners out that arc like giant rainbows and then rooted themselves in the ground wherever they landed. It took over many areas of the garden and had not produced many berries. So out of the ground it came with all my might. I counted that as my exercise for the day.
This year, after completing some soil testing, I lined up the location for our next vegetable garden. I laid down some cardboard and brown packing paper to keep the grass and weeds from pushing straight up into the new garden. I highly recommend sticking with the cardboard though. The paper flies up in the slightest breeze and needed to be constantly hosed down or pinned in place with large rocks. My husband picked up the compost in his truck and dumped it in the driveway and I hauled it to the back yard and dumped it and shaped it into a garden. It is a bit crooked and I will try to ignore it so that my need for perfection doesn’t drive me crazy. The new garden is missing its outside border of wood chips. Once the heat waves kicked in for the summer, my motivation to haul wood chips around disappeared so we will hopefully tackle that in the next month or so when it starts to cool down.
I had initially started laying out the garden and path in two large rows. But then I remembered something from Gaia’s Garden about the best way to lay out paths and planting areas and quickly rearranged the layout to look more like the diagram below. The new garden is not quite like the diagram but in an area where I would have had a path, I now have more plantable space which already has potatoes growing in it! If we expand that garden further into the yard, then I can set it up to more closely mimic that keyhole layout and incorporate the one I already started. Somehow we are already running out of space to plant everything we want to so this may happen sooner rather than later.
Planted this year so far are 3 kinds of tomatoes (of course, my husband needs his pizza sauce!), pepperoncinis, kale, pole beans, red beans, apple trees, potatoes, sweet potatoes, strawberries, blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, borage, and a number of herbs. I have a volunteer mini white pumpkin plant that sprung up in one of the raised beds and it is already taking over the rabbit fence protecting the garden. Coming soon for the fall garden are pumpkins, carrots, spinach, broccoli, and more kale.
