Gardening

There’s a lot of naturally growing edible plants around us, the best of which are blackberries, grapes, mulberries, and walnuts, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t want to grow a whole bunch more.

In fact, one of the first things we did after settling in was make a garden.

This endeavor began with putting up a seven foot tall perimeter fence, electrified on the top and bottom (a lot more critters here to protect from). We then marked out rows on contour. Each row is 30” wide, raised above the 18” wide, sunken pathways. There are about 25 rows in total, each averaging 45 feet long. The whole enclosure is about 5000 square feet.

This may sound like a lot of work, but it’s actually been very easy. We are used to clay soil with lots of rocks. We had to work hard to improve the organic content of the clay, so that it would become crumbly enough for productive gardening. This place has sandy loam. It is so easy to dig, and driving in posts and such is almost laughably effortless. We still have to add organic material and mulch, but that’s just good gardening sense!

So far we only have six of these rows made and planted. They are currently producing (or about to produce) radish, carrots, spinach, turnips, peas, beets, onions, and broccoli. The rest of the space is planted with a cover crop that we feed to the rabbits. We also have a few trees, shrubs, and all kinds of herbs planted around the inside of the perimeter fence. In all, not a bad little garden patch!