Anyone have a garden going this year?

Well thank you. I'll have to look and see if I have any pics saved of building them.

 

I remember my parents going to raised beds. They produced a lot for their diminutive size - 12x4, compared to the 50x50 of previous decades.

He put paving stone around them and between. Filled em with rich soil from down by the creek. My mom would tend to them and keep them healthy.

They slowed down, dad got cancer, then passed. Mom was physically good but devastated. She put on a face but it was hard to carry on for her. I thought, if she has the garden, it'll give her more purpose. So I cleaned it out and planted a few things. I stipulated, you'll come out and weed a few minutes every day, right? Yeah yeah. I'd come, find weeds, and ask if she'd been picking them. Oh yeah, but it's a lot to keep up with. I'd help what I could but I also had the yard to mow, fields to tend, trees to trim, things with the house and barn to handle, blah, blah. The beds had grown over by season's end but there was still some produce hiding in there. It was a chore finding it, though.

Couple years after, I took the front end loader to them. Turns out they're a huge mess since you can't just run the mower over them. Or between them even, when your mower is 60" and the space is like 30. It was so overgrown, I forgot there was stone in there. That was fun separating them out after spreading the dirt. But finally I could mow, and keep it from being such an eyesore. And potential snake den.

Now my son's living there, and he picked a little section of field about an acre to be their garden area. He's gonna start in a corner this year and maybe fill the whole section next year. His plan is to bring up rich dark soil from down below and put it on top of the cut off grass, and plant in that top layer. Something about using already established root paths instead of tilling, and I think it's referred to as some kind of "raised bed" gardening - though hardly like what it once was, little boxes on the ground with soil piled up in them and paths all around in between them.

 

With the shut down I have worked in my garden a lot. I enjoy it, and don't mind not going places. The only time I missed going places was if I needed something, for a project I was working on. I just put it on a list, and made one trip to pick up several things.

I do hope all my time pays off. Have got a few radishes. I plan to can or freeze a lot if I have a good crop.

 

Since the beginning of all this virus crisis, since we lost our activity, all my time is for the garden, I think the big winners of this crisis are the gardens!Plus everybody is realising that it may be a question of basic survival to grow his food , as it used to be at the beginning of the 20th century before we were conditioned to buy everything.
I am happy to have ALL MY TIME for my garden, and it is giving it back to me so generously!
See another pic of my sprouting beans, ready to expand and develop on the fence:
Lists are a good idea to occupy us when normalcy will come back, shopping lists for example, but we may realise that after all, a lot of things are not as necessary as they seem!

 

Amen. Now is the time my ability to do most anything is paying off extra. The days fly by but things are getting done.

 

My raised beds in the begining, 2016 I did the first as 2 12 x4 foot. Later that year a market friends gave me a 7300ft roll of drip line so I added 4 foot between them and that's how my beds wound up 28 foot long.

Not sure how some got doubled, sorry

 

2017, doing the second bed.

 

pumpkins promising!
The pictures are doubling when you click 2 times , thinking that maybe they never went through!

What a big work you have being doing there , Martnorth!

 

Doing well, PM! We got peppers and tomatoes in. Fences up. There's some space left, thinking of squash, beans, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, whatever we can find plants of. Or maybe seed, it's not too late for some of those cool weather crops.

 

hot scotch bonnet pepper, the little tree can last more than a year

 

For the coolest temperarures, there are a lot of cabbages that can do very well, as well as some lettuces, if you look at heirloom seeds catalogs they label them as winter vegetables, some of them take a long time to bear, I tried some broccolis this year, it took them about 4 months, the good thing is that they grow back a second time, but in smaller size..

 

We had a stand of asparagus for many years. Not too many people think of chomping down raw asparagus as delightful but I found it that way eating it while standing in the patch looking over the distant landscape. We put it in close to the fence. Too close. It migrated across the fence and ended up it's final days in the field of an adjacent farmer where it was eliminated in favor of his crops. Took years. It was good while it lasted.

 

Asparagus is so nice!And we know that raw food is definitely healthier, if you don t need to cook it, don t !
Maybe you should get another and plant it where it cannot migrate out of your boundaries!

 

I want to, but keep forgetting! Grrr

 

How long does it take to establish a patch of Asparagus?
So far I'm eating fresh Kale, beet greens, butter cabbage leaves and chickweed from the outsie raised beds. Cuks and zuks from the greenhouse

 

Congratulations, this is great!

 

Mom's garden is doing well... They (my parents) have revamped the entire front yard arrangement. Fewer plants, more sparsely populated area. The landscaping is really professional. Today, they have a garden crew coming for the lawn and probably to dead-head the flowers, pull some weeds, and generally make things orderly.

 

Speaking only from what I've seen in a pretty different climate from yours, no crop first year, maybe 10% the second year, by fifth year raking it in. There's tons of factors affecting it though, so YMMV.

 

Little garden updating
Beds planted

 

couple more beds of cabbage family stuff, like broc, 3 kinds of Kale, 3 types cabbage, Caluflower and some celery. then the chokecherry trees and my first strawberry. These pics were taken early June. Took. new ones today, still need to download off camera.