Our Garden
We love gardening. Every year, we spend months planning out and preparing our garden beds for the Spring planting. We do not till the soil, preferring instead to let the chickens scratch on it all fall and then loosening it with a broadfork in the spring. By doing this, we are trying to preserve the permaculture within the soil. We've had excellent results with this strategy the last two years.
We do not use any chemicals on anything in our garden. No herbicides, pesticides, or fungicides. However, we do add ample organic material to our garden beds several times each year. The mulch you see in these photos is made up of grass clippings. We only mulch with grass clippings once or twice in the entire growing season. Grass is an amazing decomposer, but you have to be careful using it too much in the garden. One of the best books we have read on the subject of decomposition/composting/mulching is Let it Rot by Stu Campbell. We highly suggest reading it if you are interested in beginning your own compost bin(s) to supplement the soil for your garden.
The first week of June, 2010. The third week of June, 2010
The second week of July, 2010
This is the center section of our garden. This year, it contains butternut squash, sweet dumpling squash, experimental melons (free seeds from last year's seed order), big beef tomatoes, sweet banana peppers, white cucumbers, and bush green beans. Very soon, we'll start adding trellises made out of bamboo. We are fortunate to have a large stand of bamboo on our property. All winter, when everything else is dormant, the bamboo thrives. We cut stalks of it and feed the leaves to our goats. Then, in the spring, we use the stripped stalks to build the trellises our garden requires.
We also have three other, smaller beds along the sides of our enclosed garden area. In these, we have more tomatoes, shallots, red onions, red cabbage, green cabbage, lettuce, spinach, dill, peas, collard greens, and blackberries.
We have also planted four peach trees (one yellow, three white), five apple trees, and two pecan trees since we moved into our home five years ago. We are hoping that this will be the year we finally get some peaches, but it's looking like we won't get any apples until next year (and it will be many years before the pecan trees begin to produce). As they say, "To plant a garden is to believe in the future." And our garden is definitely a study in optimism, hard work, and patience... check back as the season progresses to see how we've done.
Sweet dumpling squash and butternut squash grow on the bamboo trellises - third week of June, 2010.