First Seeds in the New Garden - Apr 24th

Last year we realized we needed more garden space if we hoped to provide ourselves with all of the veggies we consumed in a year. Previously we built raised gardens for our vegetables. We did this for two reasons, firstly, our property hadn’t been used in some time for growing anything but weeds, grass and saplings and it was very low in fertility and raised gardens were just easier and quicker to amend. Secondly, our property is very slow to drain in the spring and raised gardens allow us to start planting earlier, especially those frost hardy seeds and seedlings.

So why not build more raised beds? Well, our first raised beds were made out of salvaged power poles and cedar rails from around our property. Once those were used up we built beds using purchased lumber. Enter Covid-19 and soaring wood prices. This led us to building the next set of beds using concrete for the sides. This works well and we will continue to use this type of bed but they are small, only three feet by eight feet, and take time to build. Finally we decided it was time to work on in-ground beds. They’re more cost effective and we were making our own compost for amending and we didn’t feel the pressure to get high production instantly out of each garden. At this point, I should mention that we only use organic fertilizers and compost and we do our gardening using hand tools.

With the goal to start planting in the ground we spent last Spring making twelve gardens that were each three feet by fifteen feet with a three foot walkway between each garden. Each garden was slightly elevated by digging the sod out of the walkway area and turning it upside down on the garden area. We then covered the garden portion with paper and topped the paper with several inches of compost. The walkways provided an area for the water to drain when we got heavy rains. These gardens worked very well but they were a lot of hard work and we aren’t getting any younger.

Enter garden style five. Or is it six? Who know? Starting last summer we ran our meat chickens in their chicken tractor in a very strict area. In previous years the chicken tractor was just moved every day in a line until it ran in to an obstacle or a property line and then it would be moved off in a different direction. We do a make point of never putting the chicken tractor on the same spot in any given year. The chickens love the fresh greens and bugs every day and the ground loves the natural fertilizers the chickens leave behind. Win, win.

We chose the highest spot on our property, not counting the house, and decided on how much garden we wanted. We then ran the chicken tractor just in that area. The space was big enough that we still only had the chickens on any given spot once. After the chickens were moved George would broad fork the area vacated.

Onnce the ground was forked he covered it with cardboard, soaked the cardboard and then covered the cardboard with mulch. In this case the mulch was dried grass from our fields that hadn’t gone seed. The new garden area was finished by the end of September. It was then left undisturbed until now.

The last week of April saw the first seeds go into this new totally in-ground garden. We put down an inch or two of compost where we were going to plant and that was it. Our first seeds to plant were peas, both shelling peas and snap peas. The ground under the newly placed compost was damp, maybe due to the two inches of rain we got yesterday, but it wasn’t soaked like many areas on our property. So for us that’s good news. Now we just have to sit back and see what grows.

Peas aren’t the only thing going in this new garden. Potatoes, squash, dried beans, melons, pumpkins, corn, some grains and sunflowers will all be finding a home here. We feel these are the crops that we can live without or purchase inexpensively in the autumn if this garden doesn’t work. And if the peas fail we can always plant a crop of peas for an autumn harvest.