Spring 2020 – Update
It’s spring! It’s WET spring. May has been a rollercoaster of cool temps and thunderstorms and heat waves. Today is June 1, and it has rained enough that we haven’t needed to water our little seedlings to get them sprouting. The plants we started indoors have had an easy time transitioning with the cool temps and cloud cover. Soon they are really going to want some sun though!
The asparagus beds are 3 and 4, and we’re trying to keep up with picking them so they keep producing. There is definitely a difference between freshly picked asparagus and store bought! Even though they take a long time to establish, they will last for decades. All they need is a lot of weeding and a little compost. I’ve never had any kind of pest bother them.
Flower update: My roses came back! The roses near the front of the garden got heavily damaged by voles, but they are sprouting new shoots and growing quickly. We’ll see if they are the same color as last year, or if they grew back from rootstock. My peonies…let’s see, we might be up to 7…no, 9…overwintered well and the older ones are starting to look like real plants instead of spindly whisps. I think I will get a few blossoms this summer. The dahlias overwintered in the garage in plastic bins with drainage holes. I can’t believe they are all coming back, throwing little green shoots as the temperatures rise. They are a lot of work, but I made them a new stone raised bed with lots of perlite in the soil for them. Hopefully I can pull them out for storage easily in the fall.
Last fall we tried to tame the new section of garden. It was weedy and bumpy and the soil is hard clay without much organic material. We scattered all the compost, chicken manure, and decaying vegetable plants we could find, laid down cardboard, and topped everything with a few inches of wood chips. We put more straw bales out than we ever have in the past, about 15, and topped those with high-nitrogen manure and organic fertilizer. In a few weeks they will be home to a dozen squash varieties.
Last fall we had several bears attack our bees, so this spring we built a platform 11′ in the air for them. The platform will eventually have a roof and we will overwinter the bees in place. There is room for about 4 hives. 😀 The hive that was badly damaged in the fall made it through the winter really well (in the meat chicken coop) and they are building their numbers and gathering lots of pollen. Such amazing little creatures. The ornamental pear trees are blooming en masse at the Mormon church about a mile away, and I think all of our bees well…beeline it…there every day. There is a row of lilacs along the parking lot…that might be the next honey source.
The garden bar is finished, with blue-stained 1 1/2″ pine boards from a tree that overwintered beside the driveway. The Alaska chainsaw mill gets used for everything! The top is finished with marine varnish in matte, and it turned out beautiful AND waterproof! I am excited to do some social distance entertaining there this summer.
We have already done a few major structural changes in the garden already this year. We replaced several posts and replaced the old welded wire fence with stronger hog panels. It looks so much better! We also put two posts in the front garden bed to create a trellis for two cold hardy wine grapes (Itasca and Marquette) and a Violetta de Bourdeaux fig. Another post will go along the front of the greenhouse to trellis 3 more grapes.
In the new part of the garden, we added a giant flower bed around the Black Velvet gooseberry. It took forever to maddock out all the grass roots, but it looks great and gives us room for lots of perennial flowers, a patch of green glass corn, my dahlias, and some pretty annuals. In the bumpy southeast corner of the garden, we piled on some mulch and chicken manure and planted cover crops and wildflowers. The went in just in time for consistent rain, so there are a few things sprouting already. Hopefully this patch will improve the soil and slowly establish easy to care for perennial pollinator flowers!