Gardeners Hard at Work

Hard at work in the garden on Saturday May 16. From left to right, me, Kyle, Donna, and Becky. Grace took the picture.

We have prepared 30 raised earthen beds and have planted about 1/3 of them so far.

For fun, we planted several rows of Red Sweet sorn, and 4 beds of early maturing Sunshine Sweet corn. We started four beds of salad greens, including Tyee spinach, Red Sails, Black Seeded Simpson, and Butter Crisp lettuce.


To the left, Donna and Becky are planting lettuce.
We also started Cherry Belle radishes and two varieties of carrots, Red Cored Chantaney, and Danvers 126, in two of the beds in which we will later plant tomatoes. The carrots and radishes will form borders around the tomato plantings. We also planted onion sets.

Our regularly scheduled work time is Saturday morning from 8:00 until 10:00, but some of us will also meet at the garden on Tuesday, May 19 at 5:00 P.M.

Thanks again to everyone who helped out on Saturday.

Cheers,

Chris

A seed is planted

Actually, many seeds. Amazing what a few people can accomplish in 2+1/2 hours.

Next garden work date is Tuesday, May 19, at 5:00 PM.

Thank you to Donna, Grace, and Becky, who did the lion's share of the work with a little help from Kyle, we finished laying out and forming up our planting beds this morning, and cleared out the weeds and grass growing up along the north boundary of the garden.

Then, eager to get seeds in the ground, we planted onion sets, corn, spinach, several varieties of lettuce, carrots, and radishes.

We agreed to meet at the garden briefly on Tuesday evening to water and clean up a bit more.

We still have space for potatoes, pumpkins, beans, peas, squash, broccoli, cauliflower and anything else that suits people's fancy.

I have school obligations until June 10, so I need to stick with our interim schedule of working the garden at 8:00AM on Saturday, but certainly that shouldn't stop anyone from going out and doing anything that looks like it needs to be done at any convenient time.

We have a great start on a beautiful garden.

Thank you to everyone.

Chris

Beds and Pathways

Today's Activities

Donna and I met this morning at the garden. Donna pulled weeds and moved lots of dirt. I rototilled, Kyle and Kelsie got dirty. We all had other obligations for the day, but in an hour and a half we got a lot done. We laid out and cleared pathways and marked out and began preparing 30 planting beds.

There are two long beds, about 18' x 3' at the north and south ends of the garden. I suggest that we reserve these for asparagus and strawberries. In between, we marked out space for 28 smaller beds, each about 8x3. My children's attention spans prevented me from staying to finish, but at least we made a good start.

Things to Do

If anyone has time during the week, feel free to stop by and finish up a bed or two. I'm hoping that we can handle weeding and cultivation chores on an "adopt-a-bed" basis.

You should be able to see the pattern we laid out and continue the pathways between the beds. The idea is to take soil from the pathways and add this to the north ends of the beds. Currently the ground slopes to the north and it would be better if the ground sloped to the south to improve the solar heating of the soil and extend our growing season a bit. The tops of the beds should be raked flat and smooth, built up on the north and sloping down slightly to the south. This is pretty easy work with a square-nose shovel and an iron rake and only takes 10 or 15 minutes.

Watering

Eventually it would be wonderful to have a drip irrigation system, but for now I thought that an easy approach would be to set up a tractor type lawn sprinkler to run the length of a garden hose laid down the middle of the central path. We can set this up to run on a timer to comply with Del Norte's watering restrictions so the only work that would be required is a schedule to stop by and reset the sprinkler to the beginning of it's run.