I’m very excited to get back into gardening, but I’m also very nervous. I really want to make my time and efforts count and be able to grow as much as possible to feed my family. Still, I feel like there is so much that I don’t know. Everyone seems to have their own ideas of the right kind of soil mixture, the right way to fertilize (or not), the proper way to get rid of or live with pests, etc…. So, this year, I’ve decided to document all of my gardening endeavors on my blog. Then, I can take a good look and what worked and what didn’t. I am planning on using organic and bio-intensive methods, including gardening by the signs, crop rotation, and companion planting. I’ll be following The North American Biodynamic Sowing and Planting Calendar .
So far, I have my garden space planned out. We have built some raised beds and have about 270 sq.ft of gardening space. It’s not much, but we have lots more rocks to build more beds in the spring if possible. Moving all the rocks and dirt has become impossible for me in my third trimester, and Toby is already working his butt off. So, once the weather warms up and I’m feeling up to it, I will try to double our gardening space.
By late winter, I need to:
-finish filling the raised beds with composted dirt
-clean up the established herb and strawberry beds
-transplant the hops (’cause I’ll be using that space for onions and lettuce now… we are going to plant the hops in front of the cabin so it can grow up the building)
-transplant the passion flower (I’m going to move it to the grape area so it can use the trellises)
-prune the fruit trees
-place and fill the 8th raised bed box
Garden needs/things to make (that I can think of);
–rain gauge (I had one, but it’s been beat up and trampled to death)
–bird flash tape (I found that this worked really well when I used it in my last garden in 2005)
–labels for the seedlings/plants
–mini greenhouse for starting seedlings (I’m planning on using plastic bread trays to hold the soil blocks. They stack easily with some head space and I can put them in front of my south facing glass doors. Then I’ll cover them with plastic to keep the warmth and moisture in)
–soil block maker (my brother-in-law has one he said I could borrow, but I imagine we will both be needed it at the same time and often through out the year. So, I may try to order one, or make one)
–Ingredients for my seedling soil mix (following Eliot Coleman’s spoil block mix, I will need: peat, lime, bloodmeal, phosphate, greensand, I already have sand, garden soil and compost)
–trellising (I plan to grow ‘up’ as much as possible. All the vines will be trellised)
–limb spreaders (I will need to work on opening up the limbs on all the fruit trees we just planted so that the sun and air can reach as much of the tree as possible. These can be expensive if you need a bunch, so I may try making some… in my spare time! Ha!)
–Metal rods for floating row cover (I have a large amount of floating row cover, but no rods to support it over the plants. I’d like to use the cover for season extension as well as pest control)
–fertilizers/pest control (I have none of this stuff… whether it’s fish emulsion or organic pest controls (like ‘surround’ or diatomacious earth), all of it got lost/tossed/destroyed over the past 3 years of moving and building. I also don’t know what I’ll do about the fertilizers… all of the natural and organic stuff has a strong smell to it and Suki digs up anything I put it on. Last time I used a seaweed spray, she dug to china trying to find the fish under the soil)
So, I’ll get started on as much of this as I can in the next month or so… seedlings (onions and leeks) get started indoors here in mid. Feb (right when I’m due!), so I want to be sure everything is in place and ready to go.
