Spring 2019 – Update

The winter of 2019 was one giant snow dump. It didn’t fully melt off until June…we still had a pile hanging out near the driveway. When my family came up to visit for our annual Memorial Day get together/sister’s birthday/forced work party, we were about two weeks behind. It was tough to do more than weed, mulch, and pick delicious rhubarb.
(We also had our family plant-exchange, where we force extra seedlings with exotic names on each other. I see your Ancho Magnifico pepper and raise you a Indigo Blueberry tomato.)

The everything seemed to grow so SLOWLY. It was chilly and it rained quite a bit through April and May. We have always had trouble with the soil in one of our raised beds, so we finally took it all out and replaced it with fresh horse manure compost. Our straw bales in front of the greenhouse were a year old and just didn’t keep enough water to break down or produce wine cap mushrooms, so we moved them and the potato bed south a bit and built a permanent raised bed around them.

The Asian pears at the east end of the garden are starting to produce, but they are quite a bit smaller then other fruit trees we planted the same year. We wanted to give that end of the garden the same great nutrient sink as the main garden, and it all started with straw bales and mushroom mycelium in 2015. We put 2 bales between the pears, and 4 bales between the Nijiseiki and a peach. They provide a great source of nutrients eventually and they are a great water sink. I think it will help out a lot (and there are some squash planted in them to give us incentive to water them regularly).

Most exciting…we built a hoop house! The cucumbers will have their very own space! The tomatoes and peppers (and 2 naranjillas, a maypop vine, and a few volunteer peruvian ground cherries) get the whole greenhouse this year, which is great because their water needs are the same. The cucumbers can have ALL the water and they get a bonus trellis system. We built a rectangular frame out of 2x6s and wired together 3 cattle panels. The trellis is garden twine wrapped around the metal, and there are a few short panels on t-posts in the middle. The whole thing is covered with a 16′ x 28′ sheet of 3 ml plastic. So far it has kept the melon vines alive through 2 frosts, so it seems to be working.

One last big change is non-edible flowers…trying to get some perennials established and wasting some effort on some annuals. We want to establish blooms all non-snow-season long in the garden so the future bees can have a food source. Independently of bees, I’ve become obsessed with peonies, so three more went in this spring for a total of five slow-growing, cold-hardy plants. They and some clematis are doing fine, but stay tuned as I kill more roses!