Cold Frame / Raised Bed Completed

Today I managed to start and finish a new raised bed, one that will be used as a cold frame for the next month or so. As I wrote last week, I planned to use one of the smaller raised beds as a cold frame by putting windows on top, opening them in the morning so it won't get to hot during the day. After measuring the old windows I had, I modified my bed design a bit, to accommodate the size of the windows.

I plan to start my vegetable and flower seeds this weekend, although by looking at the weather for the coming week, the weather doesn't seem so bad. At the moment the vegetables I have to start are tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and squash. I'll be sowing corn and pole beans in situ. I've got non-vegetable seeds I want to germinate, like coneflowers, agapnathus, cotton hibiscus and devil's trumpet. Depending upon how many seed trays I have, some of the non-vegetables may have to wait. I also may try to grow stuff to take to the plant swap on April 10th. Wish me luck.

Biding My Time

I bought onions and potatoes last week and I decided I needed to build a few more raised beds to plant them in - quickly. Originally I decided that over the next several days I would buy concrete blocks - I need 16 for a bed and I don't want to load down my car too much - set up the beds over the weekend when I was off and get Robin to pick up Ella from school so I could go get compost after work two or three days next week. I wanted to get everything ready, so I can plant by early-mid February.

I thought that it might be easier if I could get a day off from work next week. I would still work on building the beds, but I would use that one day to make a few trips to the landfill for compost. Work has been a little busy lately and the best I could do for a day off was maybe Tuesday. That meant I had to get the beds laid out this weekend. Well, that's not going to happen now.

It has been raining steadily since last night and the low predicted for tonight is 20 degrees - again on Sunday night - so I'll have to wait until it dries out before I can get out there and work. I've accepted the fact that I have to bide my time until my next day off before I can go get compost and plant. It'll be early-mid February and that's still a good time to get onions and potatoes in the ground.

Ramblings

I'm gearing up for Spring planting by laying out new beds, trying to maximize our space. I was going to interplant vegetables with other landscape plants, but I came up with a garden plan that I like - separate from other landscaping. I still may plant a few veggies other places, especially those that need room, like pumpkins and watermelons.

I bought onions and potatoes today, and, as usual, I bought more than I have room for - so I'll have to find places for them elsewhere in the yard - maybe. I was out in the yard today and realized I had room for an extra bed or two, and I'll need them if I want to plant all of the potatoes I bought. It also means I need to get moving on building the beds and filling them - so I can hurry up and plant. Looking at my raised beds, I realized the first one I built is different than the second one - the one I'm basing my future beds on. To see the first bed, click here.

The pond has been looking sad lately. It needs to be cleaned out, but also the pumps were slowly getting clogged - causing the waterfall to slow to almost a trickle. I really didn't want to have to stick my hand in there for any length of time. I thought it would only take a few minutes so I decided to brave it this afternoon. I got them cleaned out within about ten minutes, and the waterfall is rushing again. Getting a close look at the pond today made me realize that I need to clean out leaves, dead plants, etc. I remember last winter draining the pond halfway, wading in and cleaning leaves off the bottom, but that will have to wait for a very warm day - today the water temperature was 56 degrees!

New Year, New Raised Bed

The past couple of weeks, I've felt very unmotivated to work in the yard. There hasn't been much sun left when I got home from work, and the temperature was starting to drop. When I have been home early, I just haven't felt like going back outside. It's rained some too - enough to make it no fun to work in the mud.

I saw no end in sight, with Ella starting school on Monday - so I had to give myself a big push and tell myself that it was my last best chance to get stuff done. It must have worked, because I got another raised bed almost ready to plant in two afternoons.

Wednesday afternoon, I swung by Lowe's near work and picked up ten cinder blocks. I wasn't sure how many I needed, but they're heavy and I didn't want to load down the car too much. When I got home I discovered I only needed only five more, so I immediately ran to Lowe's near home before traffic got bad. When I got back I laid them out and leveled them. Now they were ready for the compost.

Even though I'm off on New Year's Day, my only chance to get compost from the county landfill was after work on Thursday. I knew it might rain, but as long as it wasn't raining more than a light drizzle, I would still go. When I left work the rain was holding off, so I decided to go. I put plastic down in the back of our hatchback and I was off. When you buy compost by the ton at the landfill, they weigh your vehicle entering and leaving and you pay $10 a ton for the difference. I had been there in the rain before and it wasn't that bad, but today was just extremely muddy. I was having to scoop right on the surface of the pile to get the fluffiest and driest stuff. The deeper I dug, the wetter and more compact it was. It was a slow process - I also suspected that it would weigh more and I'd be paying a little extra because of it.

I loaded the car as full as I dared and then left to be weighed. 520 pounds of compost cost me a whopping $2.60. The landfill and the recycling center sell the same compost for $2 per bag - the bags probably weigh 40 pounds. Going to the landfill may be a little more effort, but it's well worth the price difference.

Once I got home, I backed the car as close to the garden as possible and shoveled it into a wheelbarrow and dumped it into the new raised bed, repeating that process four or five times. So, I'm nearly ready to plant in the new bed - I thought I would plant more lettuce or spinach, but I realized I have only a month before I will need to plant more onions and potatoes, so that bed may sit fallow until February. Our broccoli is close to being over done, so I may pull that out and plant spinach there - we'll see. I've got places to put possibly five more raised beds. As I'm thinking about the warm-season vegetables I want to plant, I may need all of those. I've posted a diagram of my raised beds here.

Rain and Flooding

I’ve always worried a lot about flooding in our yard. If we have a hard enough rain, our garage will flood. Our lot slopes toward the back, away from the house, and there’s a depression, not really a ditch, that runs along the back of the property, where rain is supposed to collect. I think there was also a ditch along our neighbor’s lot that is supposed to take the water from there, but it’s been filled in. I was planning a rain garden in the lowest part of that depression, but after Friday’s rain – at least four inches – I’m rethinking the idea. From what I’ve read, rain gardens need to drain in 24 hours, which this does not – in the worst cases. I need something, like a bioswale, that will hold more water and keep the rest of yard dry.

It rained all day Friday, and when I got home from work, most of the yard was flooded. The vegetable garden area was almost underwater – my decision to use raised beds has proven to be the right one. Since I really couldn’t do anything about it, I decided to wade out into the lowest part of the yard and measure how deep it was. It turns out it was a foot deep!

By Saturday the water had soaked in a good bit. There was still water in the depression and the yard was pretty soggy, but the worst was over. Too bad my rain barrels were already full! The morning paper reported widespread flooding, so much that they closed all roads into downtown Charleston at 6pm.

Fall Vegetable Garden

I finally started planting my fall vegetable garden. I went a long time without having anything in the ground, so I'm trying to catch up. My raised bed is finished for the most part and full of compost. This past week I bought onion sets - yellow and white - and some broccoli plants. I looked for lettuce plants, but the ones I saw were real leggy. I'll try again this weekend, and I'll also look for lettuce seeds and spinach seeds.

The feed store where I bought the onions, sold them either by the pound or half pound. With a lot of things, a pound doesn't sound like very much to me, but when it comes to onion sets, it is. I think I planted close to fifty onions so far and I haven't even put a dent in them. I looked into storing them until spring, but it seems like a lot of work and they're very cheap.

I wanted to plant something in the holes of the concrete blocks as an experiment. Since I don't know what will happen, I decided to plant onions - since I have so many of them - and hope for the best. I'll let you know how it goes.

When I got compost for the raised bed a couple of weeks ago, I went ahead and filled almost the whole bed. After reading about planting in compost, the consensus is that it is best as an ammendment to the soil. So, before I planted the raised bed, I went around the yard, digging holes, putting that soil in the garden, and putting compost in those holes. I've done that with half the bed, where I planted broccoli, and in the block holes, where I planted white onions. If I can clean out most of the dollar weed in my other beds, I'll be doing the same thing with the other half of the bed.

I feel like I don't have nearly enough room in this bed for everything I'd like to plant. I'm probably going to plant lettuce, spinach and garlic in any space I can out in the flower bed. Wish me luck.

Garden Injury

TO DO LIST:
Trim Trees
Work on the Pond
Plant Ferns
Work on Raised Bed
Cut Grass

These are some of the things on my list of things to do this weekend. I've been collecting concrete blocks for the raised bed vegetable garden. Originally I planned 4 x 8 raised beds using cinderblocks. The blocks would also give me additional planting holes. I started laying out the bed this week and 4 x 8 is too big if you factor in the extra eight inches of the blocks on each side and the ends. Unfortunately the bed will have to be smaller for me to be able to reach the center comfortably. On the plus side, I won't need as many concrete blocks.

Last week, maybe longer ago, I bought several hardy ferns from Lowe's on clearance. I've never seen them on sale before, so I felt I had to grab them. I've been meaning to plant them, but I just hasn't happened.

Recently I noticed a small but steady loss of water in the pond, more than I thought there would be with just evaporation. I noticed a constant wet spot on one of the timbers lining the bog. I figured out that it was probably water running over the liner not where it was supposed to go. I disconnected the pump to the bog until I could get around to redirecting the flow of water from the bog.

I had plans to trim the two massive trees in our yard. One is a large Magnolia behind the garage where, if I can trim it back enough, I'd like to put a chicken coop in the not-too-distant future. The other in the old Oak tree in front of our house. We're starting to get some low-hanging limbs and I wanted to cut those back. They were beginning to get in the way of power lines, cars and us.

Friday afternoon, I decided that the Magnolia could wait and I wanted to start on the Oak. I got the ladder out and a few tools - handsaw, tree saw and loppers. There was a lot of dead stuff in the tree, so I began by pulling most of that stuff out - I tried the loppers on a few branches, but they were two big, so I got out the tree saw. I would hold the branch still with my right hand and saw with my left. I successfully cut a couple of the branches before the accident happened. The part of the branch I was holding was lower than the part that I was cutting. When it slipped out of the groove I was cutting, gravity and the force of pulling on the saw directed it down the branch where my hand was - dragging the saw across the back of my hand. It didn't bleed much, but it looked pretty gross. I cleaned it, put some antibiotic ointment on it and a couple of band aids and we left to go to the doctor.

WARNING - GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS

Once there, Dr. Morgan saw me fairly quickly. I'm not sure if they realized how bad it was then, but after they got a look, they were disappointed that their students had left for the day. My injury was actually two deep cuts very close together with a thin strip of skin between them. He said I would definitely need stitches and that I was lucky that it wasn't any deeper or I would have nicked an artery. Dr. Morgan proceeded to numb the area and once that was accomplished, he pulled out the needle and thread and started sewing me up. To this point I wasn't queazy at all, but when it was time to do the stitches, I decided not to watch. I got over that quickly and tried to see what was going on, but his hands were in the way for the most part. It was fascinating that, with just six stitches, everything was pulled back together. My biggest disappointment about this whole thing - besides feeling like an idiot for getting hurt - is not getting to be in the yard doing the stuff on the list.

Revamping the Vegetable Garden - Again

July is the worst time in the vegetable garden, I think. It's so hot that it's a wonder anything will grow. It's when the squirrels , birds or rats(?) have found the tomatoes and this year it was when we took our vacation. Since we were going to be gone for more than a week and our garden would go to heck, I decided to start the process of revamping the garden early.

I decided to do raised beds again, but this time I'm using something inexpensive, but durable - concrete blocks. I really didn't want to do raised beds, but our yard had some flooding issues this spring - the last of our potatoes rotted and our bush bean seedings didn't like being in standing water - I can understand that. I've done raised beds before out of wood, but I had problems with rot and wood is expensive. I really considered pressure-treated landscape timbers, but I would have to use too many to get any kind of height. We are talking about raised beds here. We have some neighbors who made their beds from concrete blocks, two blocks high, and they really like them. I think for starters I'm only going to do one row of blocks - that's eight inches, which I think is a respectable height.

I've done the math and I think I can fit three to four 4x8 concrete block raised beds in the part of the yard we use as our vegetable garden. Before we left on our trip, I started on preparations. Since our most recent vegetable garden was hastily laid out and dug, I've had a huge problem controlling weeds and grass. I laid extra pieces of pond liner (EDPM/PVC) - black rubber, essentially) over the area that will be the future garden. It's been down almost three weeks now - I glanced under the edge and it doing a pretty good job of killing the grass. In addition to depriving it of light and water, the black plastic is also cooking the soil - killing weed seeds , etc. I'll be leaving it at least another week and then I'll be laying out the first of three or four raised beds.

It looks like I'll have plenty to plant in the next few weeks, from late summer crops tomatoes and beans to fall crops like onions, garlic, lettuce and maybe potatoes(?). All of my neighbors that "farm" have never planted potatoes in the fall, but the local planting guide says you can. I'll have to try it and see how they grow. I'll let you know.