Storm Damage

it's been a hot week.. brutally hot. last weekend i went on retreat to a slightly northerly vacation to swim in a lake and escape the city, and when i returned the garden had had another growth spurt, and outgrown most of it's stakes. because of the heat [even at night, augmented with killer mosquitoes!] i hadn't much of a chance to fix it, especially since last week i had just tied everything up to the top of 6 foot stakes there wasn't much i could do without taller ones.

finally the weather cools down, but there are only a few moments before a frightening black cloud erupts over the peninsula unleashing one of the craziest storms we have had in the past decade. the lightning was something to behold.. the wind and rain was spinning and intense, and somewhere in the weather mash up the garden took a beating. when we went out to check midway through the storm we could see that almost all of it had been pushed right down to the ground.

our last garden patch was completely surrounded by a wooden fence which acted as an excellent wind break, and saved the garden from damages like this. the more wild, almost entirely freestanding method from last year's place doesn't work here, as the field next door is an open invitation for the wind. this is the first time all year we have felt it's wrath, and this has been a key learning point for next year's garden.

i hadn't expected this patch to get as enormous as it did, big thick healthy stocks and tomato plants and vines far taller than i am. the land is fertile, our bed building method worked like a charm, and we've gotten far more rain this spring/summer than we have in the last five combined. it was just a mash of all the perfect elements to help the bed quickly overgrow and get out of control.

i suppose the fact that we weren't expecting to have a garden this year [and then built one last minute] is a contributor to the minimal staking method we went with.. after all was said and done support structures were minimally in the budget. many pieces were recycled. we had expected that the only way we would get to grow anything this year was going to be in minimally maintained patches cached away around the town, we wanted to see if it was possible to build small patches that require minimal support and care. our findings conclude that with proper wind break, it is completely possible, as long as the bed is built well in the first place.

a week away..

bad timing i know... i don't have much of a choice though. i have been chosen as the delegate for my district to represent at an international shareholders conference, and it just happened to be the first week of June. worst week to step away from the garden.. i'm nervous for the most recent planted beds as it has been very hot this past week. the first couple patches planted are already well enough established that they no longer droop in the heat. it's supposed to cool down this week, here's hoping..

we created this series of beds [which is truly one connected bed] one section at a time, so we have had the benefit of a couple weeks to observe how the first sections took before planting more. we used a sort of 'lasagna' style of building beds, we turned, mulched with cardboard, composted mulch, topsoil and composted sheep manure. there has yet to be a weed.

tada! well, this is the garden so far.. i had to halt production to reserve funds [and time] for this trip that starts tomorrow. what we have in the buckets is orange mint and peppermint, a fig tree, in the back bed lettuce [mesclun mix], carrots, radish, tomato, and rhubarb. in the main beds we have purple kale, regular and oriental eggplants, bok choy, rainbow swiss chard, and more radish. for peppers there's hot hungarian, long red italian, hot cherry, cayenne, bell pepper, and possibly a couple other i can't remember. there's a variety of tomatoes too.. cherry, black cherry, burgundy stripe heirloom, early girl, and i think there was a yellow one as well. oh, and blackberries and red onions!

the corner closest to the door houses most of the herbs, things we will want ready access to when cooking. the variety so far includes rosemary, french tarragon, regular and hot oregano, basil, sage, lavender, flat and ruffled parsley, dill, thyme and lemon thyme, chives and a little curry. i also finally found some chamomile seeds! i was excited to find any at all.

we wanted to plant a fruit tree of some sort, but we aren't sure if we can put a tree on this property.. so we decided to start with a tree we can keep in a pot; a fig tree. a woman at the farmer's market had held onto it for me, i fell in love with the idea of fresh figs. i covered the top with rocks after mulching with composted manure to keep the moisture in.

this will be the last entry until i return next weekend, when i will evaluate how the plot survives my absence in such a sensitive time. hopefully the housemates will remember to water [and love it!].

staycation in the garden.

it's been a long time since i've taken a vacation.. and this time i didn't want to travel, we are staying home this week and spending quality time in our new backyard. the experiment with the cardboard gardens continues, today we extended next to the first bed attaching the second one to it and leaving a 'key' path in between for good reach.

first we used a hard rake, pulled back the grass that was more or less dead under the cardboard we laid down a few days ago. we used a spade to turn the soil beneath, pulling out some clumps of grass, and turning some back into the ground.

after watering the turned soil, we put the cardboard back down into the shape of the bed we are creating, making sure that all of the tape has been removed from the boxes. we then watered the cardboard. on top of the cardboard we mixed a couple kinds of topsoil, one had a little more sand than the other. then we mixed in black earth, and composted sheep manure.

we rake it out into a nice even bed, leaving a 'key' path to step into for easy reach. we will leave these half-paths all along the bed spaced so that you can always reach into the center of the beds. when it comes time to plant, the soil is pulled back, and an X is cut into the cardboard. we peel back the cardboard, put some fresh soil into the hole, and drop in the plant. the soil is replaced, plus some additional rich mix is added, mulching the plant.

we added more veggies, and some annual flowers that we liked the colours of. herbs were planted in the narrow patch at the end of the 'key' path, and more annuals were planted there at the border.

last year we used white clover as a living mulch to keep soil moist, weeds down, and return nitrogen to the soil. this year we are trying something different. we are using more food between the food to take up the ground space, crowd out weeds and produce as much as we can per square foot of garden.

here we used radish seeds.. in other places we used carrots and parsnips. these radish seeds were planted only a few days ago, and already they have begun to sprout. so exciting! so far so good on the new experimental beds. on the next post, we will look into the lettuce bed!