The Garden is In

Well, it's been a busy couple of days! Our main garden plot is off and (hopefully) growing. First, we set in the lettuce seedlings (about 35 plants) and then put in the onions. The onions seedlings are so small and frail-looking that I'm not sure they're going to make it. So, I also planted a few rows of onion seeds as a backup. I also laid in four rows of carrot seeds, too. I also left a couple of fallow 4-ft square patches in order to plant some later harvests of either onions or lettuce.

The big surprise came with the strawberries. I had thought that we ordered 6 plants (2 pks of 3). So, I planned to grow them in a container, and I pressed Athos's old dog house into service. By removing the top, drilling some drainage holes in the bottom, adding a couple of boards across the entrance and filling it with soil, I reused the large unused domicile into a fine planter. When I opened the first strawberry pack, however, I quickly found out that the pack contained not 6 plants, but TWENTY-FIVE! In total, I now had FIFTY strawberry plants.

Needless to say, this change our garden design radically, especially given the space requirements of strawberries: about 1 plant per square foot. I went ahead and put 6 in the planter, then made a 3-tier strawberry bed. That accounted for about 27 more plants. Then I made a secondary bed that holds another 12. I still have a full dozen plants that I will either give away or keep on reserve to replace plants that don't make it. The two beds are shown on the flanking pictures. Right now the plants are mulched because the weather forecast is predicting snow and rain for tomorrow and maybe Monday and Tuesday.

I also built my Japanese tomato ring (a technique which has no actual connection to Japan). It's basically a tall, cylindrical compost pile, around which the tomatoes are planted. You wire the vines up the tower, and help the plants root into the compost. Supposedly this amps up the production of fruit by several hundred percent. I'll also plant two plants in containers and compare the difference. The tomato plants won't be here until mid-May, but I'm starting the compost tower early so that it has time to, well, compost. Here's a picture.


So, to make a short story long, the garden is all in for now. I may add some seeds next week for a successive harvest, add some herbs here and there, and soon will get my blueberry bushes and later tomatoes, but I feel good about where I am at this stage. Here's an overview of the whole main plot:

To orient you, the lettuce seedlings are in the left foreground, with the secondary strawberry plot on the right, the onions (barely visible) are behind the lettuce, and the carrots (nothing to see yet) are in the farthest end of the lefthand side. The tomato tower is on the right, and behind that is my main strawberry bed.

Whew. Now it's up to God, at least until it's time to water and weed.