Our Garden has Exploded

Even though I know that Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin have been overexercising their expense allotments and there are likely others among them, I won't dwell on the negative. I'm going to share something positive that helps me to relax and enjoy. While gardening is not my usual fare on this blog, I just had to do a little horn tooting for the spectacular garden we have growing in our yard right now.

Over the past several years we have been doing a lot of soil amendment to bring it back to life. The former owner used a 50/50 crop and summer fallow or just kept one half black on a rotation basis. The only trouble is there didn't appear to be anything added to maintain the soils breathability (strange word but) it was just dead and would pack hard if you walked on it too much.

Straw bed potatoes

Year after year, we saved every green scrap from the kitchen, all of our leaves (my missus even purloined bags of leaves from the neighbors waste bin one evening) and straw that we used for a couple of growing experiments I'll talk about later. Finally after six years we opened up the garden this year to a beautiful soft, diggable (another strange word) piece of ground that was a pleasure to work. There was lots of humus in the soil, the big lumps were gone and if you held a handful to your nose, it smelled clean and fresh and full of life. It just smelled healthy!

The Missus had attended a spring gardeners day workshop locally and the guest speaker there
suggested that we were better to plant in small squares (3 x 3 feet or 4 x 4). This keeps the plants closer together and they support each other and some plants that self pollinate can more easily do that whereas, long rows just string them out too far.  (Maybe there's an analogy there about how you and your partner can grow together in life's garden). Always being

Straw Bed Spuds After.

willing to experiment (in the garden) we set about marking out loose plots in a random pattern throughout the garden. Nice neat little plots with four or five or six rows each about 4 or 5 feet long parked side by side. It looked a little weird at first but now that the veggies are up it looks pretty neat. There are little pathways in between so we can still walk and reach with a hoe or by hand to weed. We did this with nearly every plant set except the potatoes (I'm coming to this new idea). The germination appears to be nearly 100 % of every thing we've planted so far except for the lettuce and we've reseeded that. In any case, everything else is doing extremely well and we're excited to harvest the bounty.

It might have been something to do with the fact that we planted on the May long weekend and the weather was hot and dry. There's an old

Last years bounty!

saying that goes "Plant in the Dust and your graineries will bust". Here's hoping.

Now to the potatoes. We've planted them in straw beds to success and dismal failure. To plant them in the soil has been disappointing because of the little black bugs or worms that get to them before we can so we've been looking for alternatives. Voila, the potato bag! Someone has invented a bag made of plastic tarp material with appropriate drain holes. The premise is that you add four to six inches of soil (we used an 80-15-5 % ration of black dirt, peat and steer manure (aged) to the bag. We then placed five seed potatoes in the mix and covered them with another 4 inches of the mix. You just roll the sides down to the level of the top of the dirt plus a bit above then water them. Within two weeks we had little spuds poking their plant heads above the dirt with 100% germination. We've also planted some in the dirt beside them in a traditional planting using the mix to fill the holes and they are all up as well. With the potatoes in the bag we'll add more dirt to keep the stems covered and just the leaves sticking out. As they grow, we'll unroll the bag some more and add more dirt until we reach the top. We'll hill the others with our dirt mix so they are all receiving the same nutrients. Once the bag is completely unrolled, we'll let the potatoes mature and blossom. Once they've died down, we can harvest (we might sneak a few new ones for an early treat because once the blossoms come on, the potatoes are about the size of an egg.  How do we get into the bag you ask. Well, this inventor made a handy trap door with velcro closers so you can just open it up, and go prodding gently in the earth for a few spuds. Then close it up stuffing the dirt back inside so the spuds can grow some more.

potato bags

There now wasn't that more cathartic than me ranting about some folks who feel self-entitled.
Watch for more about our gardening progression in the up coming weeks. Like how we kept the aphids at bay and how we repaired a worn patch in the lawn using our amazing dirt mix. Might even share my grape adventures - there's a least four bunches growing on the vines as we speak.
Till then, keep on gardening. Dave