Finally, the snow is GONE and the dirt is no longer frozen, yippee!
With Old Man Winter slowly fading into the ever-higher, rising sun, it's time for us to get soiled. Like most kids, playing in the dirt was the boom. Who knew that as I got older, playing in the dirt would be even more fun?
This past week was mostly spent getting many of the garden beds back to snuff. Boards that had been used to make raised beds, garden boxes, and the wooden structures that support the boxes, were in disrepair. For the past six years, raised beds and container planting have kept us off of our knees and have been a blessing for our back.
Before planting, these issues needed to be addressed.
While putting together a hobbitational plan, prior to getting started, I reminded myself several times to take it easy in the beginning. "DON'T OVER FARM, it has been a long winter."
With potatoes being a veggie that doesn't mind the cold, I figured I'd start here. We already had the seed potatoes and I was excited to get them in the ground!
The wooden side of the bed had to be totally replaced and the opposite side, the rock wall, needed to be reworked. Our plans were to widen the bed a little. This would necessitate adding some soil to the bed, but I had that covered.
Decaying leaves in one section of our compost pile were getting ready for the Spring of 2024. After two years of cooking recycled plant vegetation and leaves, the other section was ready to go.
With some of the compost in the wagon, dirt emptied from @farm-mom's flower boxes would be mixed in with it. I can already hear the potato seeds saying, "Thanks for cooking me up such a nutritious meal."
After the new sideboards were replaced, shoveling the homemade, worm-filled, BLACK GOLD into the potato garden was a RUSH.
Here are the seed potatoes that we ordered for this go-around, Red Norland, German Butterball, Yellow Fin, and Burbank Russet.
After baking in the sun for the past two days to activate growth, let the planting begin.
The bag of sulfur you see in this picture is used to treat the cut ends of the larger potatoes. The big ones can be cut in half, basically giving you two seed potatoes for the price of one. Treating the freshly cut spuds with sulfur will help to prevent any disease from damaging the freshly cut potato.
With 54 seed potatoes planted we're hoping for a banner year.
When all is said and done and watering becomes the focus of the garden, in the past, we have watered everything by hand. This will be the first year that we'll be using a drip irrigation system on some of our garden beds. Not only will this save us time, but we're also hoping to cut down on the amount of water we use.
The next area of the garden that needed to be refashioned were these four planter boxes. I made these 10 years ago before we even had a garden. They were placed in sunny spots around the property. When we decided to start a real garden, these boxes were placed on top of the support structure you see here. Last year I noticed that the bottom of the boxes were rotten and this year I made one big box to replace the four boxes.
Placing the black bin under the boxes worked out great. As I lifted the boxes off of the support structure, the bottom of the boxes fell apart and the dirt ended up in the bin. This saved me from having to shovel the dirt off on the ground.
The old boxes were only eight inches deep. I made the new box with 14" walls.
At this new depth, carrots can now be grown in this box. Now there're three beds that are at least 12" deep, giving us another area to rotate the carrots into.
Last year this box, that was planted with tomatoes, almost didn't make it. The framing under this box had split, and the box was leaning badly to one side. The legs supporting this structure were also leaning very badly, throwing the entire run of beds out of plumb. A few of the legs were several inches off of the ground. I jacked up the pillars and reset the legs.
After several hours of hobbitizing, the structure was once again sound. Filling it back up with soil was a good workout.
After several days of refurbishing the wooden boxes and the structures that supported them, it was time to move onto the garden bed that was outlined with stone. After reworking the stones I added a mixture of compost and dirt to this bed, increasing the overall depth by several inches. This bed will also be watered with a drip irrigation system. When running the hosing to this bed I attached the hose to the structure that use to support the hops. Doing this will keep the hose off of the ground and I will not have to move it every time I cut the grass.
With all of the repairs completed, the last thing we addressed were the two apple trees. We removed the grass from around the base of the trees, side dressed them with loads of compost, pruned them, and restacked them. Last year we harvested just three apples. This year we hope to get a lot more.
Watering the garden by hand has always been very time consuming. We installed three different drip hoses to water the peas, potatoes, and the bed where the cucumbers and tomatoes will be planted. This should cut the watering time in half.
With this many valves and five different hoses at the ready, it's just a matter of opening the correct valve, and then remembering to turn it off.
