It's been a while, so I am going to put on a nice big update today.
I have been spending most of my free time getting my square foot gardens and other garden areas ready for planting. I have taken more trips than I would like to admit to get compost, spent a fair chunk of change getting materials for the raised beds, and put a lot of work into moving a lot of dirt. Since spring is definitely here, though, I have been enjoying almost every minute of it. The excitement all started when we saw our first flowers, some English Primrose. Apparently these are hard to grow, but we did not even know we had them and have done nothing to take care of them. These photos are from a couple weeks ago. They have even more flowers on them now.
You might remember the blueberries I planted a couple weeks ago. Here they are now, with some leaves poking out.
I spent a couple hours today putting up trellis wire for our blackberries and raspberries. The blackberries are looking very strong, and we should have a lot of fruit since I learned how to prune them properly. Turns out the fruit grows on second-year side branches, and cutting the main stem and side branches to the right length helps get the best crop. The wires are going to help me keep a nice row, because last year the grapes (where blueberries now reside), raspberries, and blackberries grew too much and covered the whole area (greener photo below from July last year).
For those few to whom I have not explained square foot gardening, let me show you with pictures. The back story is that when I decided to get into gardening late 2008, I went to the book store and decided to get only two books. One was Reader's Digest All New Illustrated Guide to Gardening. My parents had gotten us Reader's Digest Guide to Home Repair as a wedding present, and I love the format and information density, so I thought the garden book would be just as good. It is. The second book was The All New Square Foot Garden, because it looked like a fun, easy way to construct an orderly garden. I stopped myself at buying two garden books. I did not want my garden shelf to look like my cookbook shelf, covered in 35 books that rarely if ever get used (although I am going through most of the cookbooks occasionally to make use of them all). I still have not bought another gardening book, but as part of my Master Gardener class we got quite a few last fall that have been great additions.
Anyways, here is one of my three square foot gardens. It has the grid for order, the PVC conduit to drape weather protection over, and the steel conduit trellis with nylon netting for vine plants. You might notice in the background some Earth Boxes, two of which I got from my fantastic mother-in-law, and three I got from Kendra when her and Paul moved to Massachusetts last summer. One had a 5 foot tall cherry tomato plant on it when we drove it across town!
This box is going to be covered in strawberry plants, which should have shipped from Stark Brothers yesterday. I got two June bearing types and two ever bearing. The chicken wire cage is for rabbit protection. I have one for each box. I do not know how I will use those and the weather protection, but I will figure something out (the book is not that explicit on this matter).
Ah, and here are the first few plants. I have broccoli in the foreground and leeks behind in the raised bed. All this work and so far this is all I have to show for it!
Here are two tiny pea vines popping up from a self-watering pot Kendra gave me.
The previous owners had a circular tower of strawberries, although it was not very full of plants. I let some spread last year and they are coming up this year. After I get a crop from them, I promised Aimee I would remove them because we will have the raised bed and this structure is not the best. A couple of the plants are just now getting some flowers.
Now, I go out in my garden almost every day to look at everything around the house. We had moved some asparagus root rather brutally last fall, and I did not expect it to survive. I audibly gasped when I saw this 5-inch spear poking out today! There are two more from other root stocks too. Maybe we will have a good asparagus harvest this year.
To summarize, if you are still reading this, you should come visit later this summer because we are going to have a fantastic bounty of fruit and vegetables.
What has Aimee been doing this whole time? She still gets me to go to yoga once or twice a week. She is training for her half marathon, including running 8 miles yesterday and 3.7 today. And, she is using her new sewing machine to make pillows and soon to make a quilt:
It's all very tiring.
Gypsy still avoids the camera, so we have few pictures of her, but here's a good one of Echo hiding from the vacuum to end the post:
