SharonAndAdam.com

Garden Expanding

First a little update.

A few weeks ago we planted tomatoes and peppers – thanks Roses for the seedlings! Unfortunately, two were attacked by squirrels (or something) which prompted me to put up the net. We are hopeful they will recover. This week we’ll plant pole beans along the back trellis.

Interestingly enough, the net saved the rest from last weeks hail storm. I can’t say the same for my grapevines. Last year I had one cluster. This year I counted over twenty on a single vine. The hail storm took out about a third of those. Again, we’re hopeful; One of the vines had just started budding and the others are recovering.

Beautiful weather this weekend to continue where we left off. The first task was to get the second bed up. This bed was roughly based off the same no-dig approach but a bit more economical – we substituted the compost and manure with our community’s free compost and the Natural Gardener’s cow manure respectively. This will be the melon box hosting watermelon and cantaloupe. Fulton was all over helping with this garden since he’s the one who requested watermelon.

Next up is my own personal project:

What are these you ask? They are rhizomes. What are rhizomes? Roots used to propagate hops. You heard right. I am experimenting on growing my own hops for homebrewing. These here are Cascade and Nugget ordered from Freshops; two varieties that are pretty hardy and can be used in a large selection of brews. One they start growing – and they grow fast – I’ll rig up poles for the vines. They can climb up to 30 feet!

I’ve also added to my reading list The Homebrewer’s Garden. It helped me get the rhizomes started. Now if I can just clear out the area by the garage for some barley…

Here’s the box for the Cascade:

And the small one in the foreground here is the Nugget:

The other box in the background is our final and third raised bed. Sharon and I recently stumbled upon the All New Square Foot Gardening concept. It looks promising so we’re going to give it a shot here with raising cucumbers and squash vertically and a few other items on the ground. The soil preparation is quite different from the no-dig approach we’ve been using so we haven’t dived in yet but will soon.

Garden Bed

We’re taking another stab at this gardening thing. Each attempt has provided better results but we need to kick it up a notch. The last time we used the native soil in our backyard we learned that the garden would not drain properly – even with additional garden soil and compost – and the plants were constantly fighting fungal diseases. The best solution to this problem is to increase the depth of good soil; which means a garden bed.

I searched craigslist for a couple days for free lumber and came upon some the other week. It was rather convenient that it was actually wooden crates for transporting glass; it was just the right size so we just had to break it down and transport it home (thanks for the help, Marc)!

We decided on trying a no-dig approach as described here. Playing it by the book, I was able to find Back to Nature’s chicken manure and cotton bur compost at Barton Springs Nursery and the garden soil, decomposed granite, and pine needle mulch at The Natural Gardener. You can get a significant price break on a variety of soils, composts, and mulches at The Natural Gardener if you bag it yourself.

All in all, it came out to be around $1.72/sq. ft. for materials. Subsequent plantings won’t be quite as expensive as we’ll use our community’s free compost and occasionally add another layer of manure with fresh soil. You could also bring the price down a bit by using chipped cedar instead of the pine needles for mulch.

The question now is what to plant?

Well, finally!

Last week’s converstaion about the garden went something like this (keep in mind we haven’t seen a single veggie come out of that garden in weeks or months)…

Me:  So, any cucumbers yet? Any more beans?  I know the tomatoes are a lost cause.

Adam:  No, nothing. I’m not convinced of this whole gardening thing.

Today for grins and giggles, I decided to see if that one single 2 inch tomato was ready to be picked.  Therese has been wanting to pick it FOREVER and it finally turned red.  While I was at it, I check on the cucumbers.  We had so many blooms I just couldn’t believe we didn’t have fruit yet.  Blessed be God!  I found small cucumbers starting to grow.  Therese picked her tomato–and ate it as soon as we could come in to wash it.  And she saw that our cucumbers are  finally growing.  There may be hope for this whole gardening thing after all.

First Harvest!

We harvested our first round of snap peas!  Oh and are they yummy!!  It wasn’t a whole lot.  And Therese probably ate half of them as she was sneaking back into the house after we washed them to keep getting more.  But there are more on the vines.

 I also realized that I’ve been too lax in loosening the soil as the peas seem to have developed yellow leaves near the roots that result from poor drainage. 

We have two tomatoes still going strong and the runner beans are about to flower!

Garden Netting

Adam spotted another tomato starting on one of our plants a couple of days ago. This of course means we needed to do something to stop our little furry friends from eating it. So our first and hopefully only course of action is a garden net. Adam can also use the net with his grapes when they become large enough to attract our kids–I mean the birds.

So we wrapped our garden “snuggly” with this net. I’ll post a picture soon. Let’s hope this is enough of a deterant.

More First Fruits

The very first sign of fruit has appeared in the vineyard!