Now that the winter weather is over--please keep your fingers crossed on that one--it's time to get gardening! Last year, we had a lot of prep work to do to get our garden off the ground As Oli & I are such procrastinators, this is where we were at in early June last year:
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| Babywearing in action! |
This year, since the garden bed is in, it's just a case of deciding where to put things, plus a little fine-tuning of the existing 'infrastructure'. That was my achievement this past Saturday: during one of Sprout's naps, I added another 'pole' for the beans to grow up & moved the attachment points at the bottom. Here's a shot of my handiwork (the faint white lines are the strings I adjusted), with Oli playing in the dirt, er, weeding:
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| A boy & his dirt. |
I'm quite excited that we're going to be getting stuff in the ground at least two or three months ahead of when we did last year. (Read:
I'm quite excited that
Oli will be planting things. I will contribute on a one-off basis, but tend to lose steam on the recurring work like weeding, watering & pruning. Heh.) Our garden was actually quite fruitful last year, despite planting in June or July. We hope to do more offset planting of things like lettuce & tomatoes so that we can harvest gradually, rather than all at once. We're also going to move things around a bit, like the zucchini, which kind of took over a large swath of our bed last year. I think trying to grow it in a container might work, as long as we can water it enough, so that we can move it away from the rest of the garden when it gets gigantic.
There are lots of gardening ideas floating around here, among them:
- planting wheat somewhere
- trying watermelon again
- providing space for someone else's bees
- buying some ladybugs to combat the aphids if we end up with the severe infestation we had last year
- growing some hop vines to use in Oli's homebrew
- adding flowers to the yard, like hollyhocks & more bulbs rescued from a demolished house
- generally taking out more of the lawn & turning it over to productive herbs, veggies, fruits & nicer plants than grass
Are you going to grow anything this year in your yard/planters/community garden plot? What have you had luck with in the past? Do you have any suggestions for us?
We're planning our garden too. It's much smaller than yours, as we haven't ripped up too much yard yet, or existing non-edible plants. Paul and Andrew cut and ripped out quite a bit of lawn last year to enlarge it.
ReplyDeleteLiza and I are pretty much the gardeners and harvesters, so we get to decide what to plant. :) Kira has requested pink flowers of course. Probably sugar-snap peas, since we eat so many of those in this house, potatoes, carrots, kale (eat a lot of that too). Maybe cucumbers, although we didn't have any luck with those a few years ago-not even a sprout. Perhaps I will try plants instead of seeds for some things. Some fresh herbs...green onions, garlic, maybe squash, lettuce. It's hard to choose things the deer won't eat. They eat so much of our garden!
We used mostly plants last year & had some great luck with nearly everything. Didn't spend a whole lot on them either. Go for it!
DeleteWe don't have any wildlife interested in eating our garden really--the birds might go after seeds & really small seedlings, but the raccoons, cats & skunks didn't touch anything in there. The only solution for the deer is to fence it off about 5 feet high, as far as I know. Using chicken wire or other mesh type stuff is what people do on the Gulf Islands where they have a bit of a deer issue.
Or what about a scarecrow? You think maybe you could build something that might scare deer? A cougar-shaped scarecrow? LOL