Garden Update

I've been out in the garden pretty much all day every day for the last few weeks. Mason gets home from work and comes straight outside to get in a few hours until dark. We worked from 1-8 on Saturday after Soil Builders and from 8-8 Sunday cutting sod to make more room for new beds. Weeding the bermuda grass by hand has just not been possible for the amount of space we need in the time that we have. Hopefully, the sod cutter will be the last large piece of equipment we'll ever need in these plots. We're going to be a no-till garden and work on building the soil by adding as much organic matter as possible and utilizing several rounds of cover crops.

Our plots for now are as follows:
West Garden-26'x40' with (4) 4'x12' mounded raised beds and (4) 4'x20' mounded raised beds and a poorly planned double row of garlic running right through the middle.
East Garden-in progress for tomatoes.
Back Garden-in progress for other summer crops.
Perennial Garden-13'x40' partly shaded, partly full sun planted with sunchokes, rhubarb, horseradish and society garlic this year. We hope to add asparagus, more rhubarb, ramps, sorrel, Egyptian walking onions and whatever other edible perennials we can find.
Front Bed-100 or so square feet for herbs, flowers and maybe some mixed edibles like habanero and medusa peppers.


we need to add more lines to the pea trellis


our hay row for potatoes


a blue potato plant


monstrous garlic tops


buckwheat planted in our band of heavy clay


flowering kale

As you can see, we still have a lot of work to do in the next two weeks.
For now, we have broccoli that's finally starting to get some size but probably won't form large heads before it gets too warm, collards, kale and chard that are ready to begin harvesting, peas climbing up the string trellis, garlic getting huge, potato plants poking through all over the place, lettuce being eaten up by someone/thing other than us, buckwheat almost blooming and ready to be turned under, the first eight tomatoes in the ground, pots of strawberries, calendula and herbs ready to be put..somewhere, Ragged Jack kale that's going to seed (which I'm hoping to save), a huge pile of shredded leaves for mulching and tons (literally) of sod to roll up and haul off.

-Megan