How our garden grows...

So, after almost a year of neglect, I've decided to take over the blogging duties. It's more in line with my interests than Chris's anyway, and I find myself with a little more "free" time than him these days (can't imagine why!). We have completed a number of projects that I need to catch up on here, but I think I'll start with the outside, and especially our efforts to grow as much of our own food as we can.

Over the fall, we re-configured and expanded on our existing veggie garden to make better use of the space. Once the veggie beds were laid out, we tackled the last "wild" corner of our property by cutting down several trees, including all the Rose of Sharon, and eradicating the wintercreeper that had taken over every spare inch of ground space. We also pruned back the existing black raspberry canes and trained them into three hills.

In the spring, we added a rhubarb and asparagus bed along the back fence, a watermelon/melon and potato bed along the side fence, and a large strawberry bed in the central area. We've had quite a bit of fruit already from the strawberry plants, and the kids love to go out and pick fresh raspberries every afternoon.

Back in the veggie garden, we got to work as soon as the ground was workable. We divided the three long beds up into smaller planting sections along the lines of the square-foot gardening plan. The south bed gets the most sun in early spring and becomes progressively shady as the trees fill out and summer comes on, so we focused on planting spring veggies here. We put in two sections of onion, some broccoli, lettuce, radish and two sections of peas. Things were looking really nice by mid-April, and we had our first home-grown salad by the end of the month.


We started on the rest of the garden in May, planting carrots, scallion, chard, bush and pole beans, daikon radish and two more rows of peas in the central bed, and potatoes, mid- and late-season corn, five varieties of tomatoes, red bell pepper and cucumbers in the north bed. Pumpkins, storage onions and indian corn went in the large west bed along the fence, as well as a few sunflowers and nasturium.





By June, most of the spring crops were harvested, and we prepped the bed for a second planting. We plan to put in a few bell pepper plants, and hopefully they'll get enough direct sun to flourish. All of our hot peppers are growing closer to the house, in one of the flower gardens along the driveway. We also have a couple of volunteer tomato plants from last year's volunteer tomato, some storage onions, and our herb garden planted up by the back door. Oh, and we discovered yet another volunteer tomato growing over by the new apple tree - we have no idea what kind it is, but it seems to be thriving! And speaking of apple, I forgot to mention that we put in a 5-year-old Macintosh along the north fence of our yard to replace an old, rotted pear tree that we'd had to cut down. We're planning to put in another tree, probably golden delicious, next spring. We'd also like to put in a few blueberry bushes, but we'll need to fiddle with soil acidity to get them to grow here. All in all, the edible portion of our landscape seems to be coming along nicely!