SPRING: A TIME TO TAKE STOCK OF GARDEN PROJECTS TO COME

Happy spring!

In preparation for the first day of spring, we spent some time over the weekend walking through our still partially snow covered yard taking an assessment of what needs doing this year.

The creek that runs under this little bridge and it's twin a bit farther east  ranges from a trickle to a gully washer  at various times during the year.

At the top of the list is replacing the bridges Mr. Much More Patient built over the creek the year we bought the house 15 years ago. He used cedar for the boards but they seem to have fared no better than the pressure treated structural timbers over the year. The whole enchilada is rotting. I don't think we can complain as they've lasted a decade and a half and it will be a good excuse to make them a little wider. Not only does my two-wheel wheelbarrow barely fit on it (and it has careened off the side on more than one occasion), but there is a very small chance we may have a garden tour at the house next year and I'd like the bridges to be a touch wider for guests just in case.

The boards on top just lift up and you can see that there's rot in the structural bits too.

I also took the time to make a few notes about areas of the garden that I'd like to do some rearranging in, particularly in the sunny part of the garden north of the house. This has been the default garden for things I'm dividing or don't know where to plant, but I'm feeling the need to do a little fixing up in that area.

While walking to that garden we looked up and noticed the the chimney has mortar falling out all over the place again. We love that chimney but it has serious issues. We've had two people out over the  years to fix it. The first one was OK but sloppy. The second one, I think, actually lied about even going up there to do anything. So now we find ourselves having to find a mason and I'd like to get that done sooner rather than later because they always trash the garden.

If you look closely, you can see that the beds are bulging pretty badly. When we built it we sunk eight 4x4 cedar posts in the ground so we thought it would maintain its shape, but that's not been the case. In retrospect we should have added strapping to keep the beds from bulging. You can see the metal brackets on the front corner that are temporary measures to hold it together this year.

The bridges aren't the only thing rotting in our yard. The main raised bed garden is completely falling apart. We knew this would happen. We built it using cedar posts and untreated pine. In its eighth year, the pine boards are bowing terribly and rotting everywhere. The ones on the north end have crumbled. What we didn't expect was that the cedar 4x4 posts have also rotted. Is cedar not like cedar used to be? It seems like it's failing quickly.

The north side of the garden is in the worst shape. Not only are the boards rotten, but the posts they are screwed in to are as well. 

The solution is a patch job. We've bought some corner brackets to hold it together and we'll have to replace the boards on the north end with something. Even scrap wood would be OK. Mr. Much More Patient has some plan to get the screws to bite into the rotten posts.

The reason we're not doing a proper fix is that I'm very excited to report that the plan is for a complete redo of the veggie area next year. The dream of a potager is one I've been trying to shake for a few years but it just won't go away. So my plan is a new set of raised beds, room on the edges for growing fruit, a large fence around the entire thing and a small seating area to soak up the sun in the center. On the rough sketch I have there is also a faint dotted line on the back of the fenced-in area that says "Future greenhouse." I should be so lucky, but it doesn't hurt to have a plan just in case.

This is also the time of year when I make notes for future plantings. I stuck a few sticks here and there around the garden to represent possible locations for trees, which helps me visualize the location from various spots inside, as well as judge the amount of sunlight an area gets throughout the day, something I'm generally terrible at (optimism make me see sun that's sometimes not there).

These are difficult days for a gardener. There is a lot of pent-up desire to garden but no ability to do so. This kind of planning helps. In fact, maybe gardening is like proms and parties in that sometimes the anticipation is even better than the main event. 

Something finally planted

A new raised bed is in  and the onions are planted. I plan to grow some kale on the other side of it, but most other things will be off limits as this bed is not protected from the overactive deer population in our yard.

It feels great to have something in the ground (I did finally get the peas planted too, but I'm so late on those thanks to frozen solid soil in the raised bed that I don't expect much production out of them) but beyond that I'm mostly still in early-spring clean-up mode. That doesn't make for great photos or inspiring blog posts, but the good news is that I have a few things planned for next week that are exciting.

I'll have a very cool giveaway on Monday and later in the week I hope to launch something that I've had waiting to go for months.

Have a good weekend in the garden, everyone!

Leafy bits

I'm working on so many projects right now that sometimes I can't remember which one is which, but I took a bit of time off this weekend to help Mr. Much More Patient with some leaf removal. It's the least I can do seeing as how I have a very specific way in which I like the leaves to be handled and he's nice enough to appease me.

It's taken me awhile to come around to it, but I'm now firmly in the camp of those have an unnatural love of leave mold. And you know, it only makes sense. Anyone who has ever dug into the dirt on the forest floor knows that it is rich, black, loamy goodness and that's partly because there are no anal suburbanites in there raking (check that, blowing) all of the leaves out. And all those leaves break down into really good stuff.

Of course whole leaves are no good on our lawns and gardens because they tend to form a mat that chokes out anything living below it. Good for forests (fights weeds), bad for gardens (kills your precious plants/grass).

Leaf mold, which is just decomposed leaves, is great for all kinds of things, not the least of which is a natural, good-for-the-soil mulch. Like everything, leaves break down much quicker if they are smaller. Which is exactly why my husband spent the better part of the weekend walking back and forth on our lawn.

I stuck my hand in the wheelbarrow of leaf bits to show you the rough size we chop them up to. This pile of brown bits will turn into a lovely soil amendment or mulch with time.

The system we have figured out is that you take the mulching mower we have (a walk-behind model) and chop up the leaves once and let them lay on the ground. Then you engage the bagging feature and mow over them one more time, which cuts them up nice and small and bags them for you. With a lot of leaves on the ground, I bet he only gets about 75 feet before the bag is full, so my job is to continually dump the wheelbarrow as it fills with leaves dumped from the mower bag.

Lots of the leaf pieces go in the compost bin, but even with the relatively small amount we added I'm sure our brown-to-green ratio is heavy on the browns. I also make a pile next to the compost bin. I can add these to the compost in spring or summer when I have a lot of greens or, more likely, I can use them as mulch on the garden beds next spring or summer. They won't be completely decomposed by then, but they don't tend to tie up the nitrogen in your soil as much as some wood mulches can. And if all that doesn't convince you, let me tell you that since my mom starting mulching with chopped up leaves about four years ago her mostly clay soil has become pretty amazing.

So that's one thing I learned from my mom. Here's another:

For the past several years I've been heeling in all the plants I didn't get around to planting for whatever reason, caging them with chicken wire to protect them from critters and then filling the wire up with chopped leaves for some additional protection from the elements. Usually I do this in an out-of-the-way corner of the garden or on the edge of the woods. This year my mom asked why I didn't do it in the raised veggie garden. After all, it's already caged in and therefore protected from critters, it's much easier to dig into because the dirt is nice and soft, and I unearth my plants well before it's veggie planting time. Chalk one up for mom. Not sure why I didn't think of that.

Can you see the plants sticking up out of the leaves? They are all snug in their (veggie) bed for the winter. I also filled up the auxiliary raised bed in the background with leaf bits because that dirt needed some help and I figured they can break down just as well in there for the winter.

Anyway, the handful of plants I had sitting around (maybe eight or so), got plunked in the dirt in the veggie garden and I covered those too with a healthy amount of chopped up leaves. Next spring I'll just work the leaves into the soil. Win. Win.

Almost finished

The new raised vegetable garden is almost finished. We still need to mulch the path between the beds, and put up the deer fence around it, as well as the door at one end. We (and by we, I mean my husband) made it with cedar posts sunk into the ground about a foot, and untreated pine 2x10s. The pine will rot faster than a treated pine or cedar, but cedar was too expensive and I didn't want any treated wood touching my vegetable garden.


The beds are 14 feet long, 30 inches high and 30 inches deep. The depth was determined by how far I can reach from the middle aisle. I filled the bottom with anything organic I could find: all of the stuff from cleaning up the garden, the sod pulled from the middle aisle, uncomposted compost and lots and lots of leaves. Then I filled it with a combination of pulverized topsoil and Soillife Compost (great stuff sold by Minor's Garden Center). I also added a bit of composted manure. For now I will just mulch around the outside as well (in the distance you can see the large pile of itty bitty pine chips leftover from grinding out some tree stumps that I think will do the job perfectly), but in the future I'll probably plant some deer resistant perennials there (nepeta comes to mind) to pretty it up a little.

The makings of a veggie garden

For the first time in my life I'm going to try my hand at vegetable gardening. Well, not the first time. When I was a kid my mom gave my brother and I some space in her veggie garden to grow things that are satisfying for kids to grow. In our case it was radishes. I detest radishes, but fortunately my dad liked them, so I would merrily pick a radish and hand it to him, waiting to watch him eat it and compliment me on how good it was.

I've also grown a lot of tomatoes (although technically I suppose that would be fruit gardening). It was actually the tomatoes that led me down this path. A few years ago I created what I call the Circle Garden. It's not a circle, but it's round so let's not get too technical about it.


It's one of my many gardens that is still under construction (although, aren't they all?). In one segment of it I planted rhubarb and tomatoes. Well that was great. For three years. And then last year my tomatoes were not doing well at all. I had yellow leaves, not a lot of fruit, and, generally, they were unhappy. I realized that the problem with the circle garden is that it doesn't allow anywhere for me to rotate where I place the tomatoes (the rest is planted with perennials and then herbs, a climbing rose and a clematis in the middle). So, last year I started thinking about a veggie garden somewhere, but where? I didn't want it too close to the house (come on, they are NOT pretty, at least not to me), but there wasn't a lot of sun elsewhere.

So we ended up putting it on the opposite side of the property (I'll explain more some other time), after cutting down a few huge pine trees. But the inspiration for this garden—the thing that REALLY made it happen—was lunch at the Kumeu River Vineyard in Auckland, New Zealand. It was there where I saw this raised veggie garden.


The problem there was the birds, but without the top netting I thought this kind of garden would work perfectly to combat the deer and bunny issues we have. So my dear husband set to work and built me something like it. This is the first bed completed.I'll have post more on the veggie garden soon. I'm really excited. Now if those veggies would just hurry up and grow (oh yeah ... have to plant them first.)