One of my goals this year is to keep a journal of the garden–photos and descriptions of what’s growing, what problems we are having, what we are doing with the produce, etc.
I plan to focus on the vegetable gardens. We have two–a main one up by the barn and a smaller, mostly raised bed garden down by the well. We’ve been thinking about reducing the size of the main garden, which is currently about 3,000 square feet, and increasing the size and use of what we call the well garden. The main garden has the best soil, since we have been improving it with compost, manure, grass clippings and leaves for about six years, but the well garden has the better sunlight and is easier to water from the well.
February 18 – 20
Vanessa started seeds for the following:
- Tomatoes
- Carmelo
- Yellow Brandywine
- Persimmon
- Mortgage Lifter
- Specked Amish Paste
- Black Vernissage
- Kohlrabi
- Broccoli
- Peppers
- Carmen
- Orange Lunchbox
- Jalapeño
I started two types of onions (white Texas Grano and Sweet Spanish Yellow Utah Jumbo) in egg cartons as experiment. I’ve never grown onions from seed before. These are short-day onions and should be ready to transplant outdoors in the middle of April, after the last average frost date. At that time, I will also sow seeds directly into the garden to see how they do.
March 12
Been basically a slow gardening month, so there’s not much to report. The weather has changed, however. Three weeks ago, we had 5 inches of snow, and for the past week or so, we’ve have gorgeous 60 and 70 degree days. It’s supposed to rain today and tomorrow, starting a wet period. Here’s a short list garden-related items:
- A mouse or some sort of insect ate the tops off Vanessa’s pepper sprouts, so we moved the grow-rack into the office. Not sure why what-ever it was focused on peppers–it didn’t bother anything else, and since we moved the rack into the office, we haven’t had any more problems. It was the end of seeds for lunch-box peppers, however, which Vanessa uses for making a chicken-pepper stir fry. Bummer. 😢
- My onions came up, but sort of scattershot–I have sprouts in about 70% of the cells.
- We cleaned out the raspberry row a week ago and replanted about two dozen plants in two new rows. If those rows take off and do well, we should have plenty of raspberries for the next few years. Since raspberries are biennial, they won’t start producing big time until next year, though we might get some berries from the new plants this fall.
- This morning I’m going to clean out strawberry beds.
- The big project right now is building a fence around the new raised beds we build down at the well garden last spring. The fence will be about 100 feet long (roughly 25 in each direction). I had all the lumber and concrete delivered yesterday. It was expensive, almost $1,200 for rough cut poplar railing, treated pine posts and 2 x 6s for raised beds–wood has gotten very expensive lately. I will take some pics as I work on it.
- Which I am heading outside to do very soon.
March 19
I have finally gotten all the posts up for the new fence. I had forgotten what a chore that is. I started off by putting the post hole digger on the tractor, but hardly used it at all. I ended up digging all the holes by hand, with a clam shell, because there were so many rocks in the ground. That was especially true for the holes along the driveway, where I had to use a breaker bar to break up and remove rocks.
Several times this week I announced to Vanessa that this was “my last building project.”
But the hard, dirty part of this project is done. Today I will stretch the wire fence around the posts and then attach the rails and then build a raised bed around the outside. I think we will like the final product.