Last years garden

To get things started I thought I'd post some pics and review what I did last year. The first two pictures show the garden in May, and the last two are August.

One of the biggest challenges of gardening is working with what you've got. A south facing garden is ideal, but we don't all have that option- with little flat land and a forest on the south side of our house, I had two options: tear up the front lawn, (which I would love to someday do, but for now is off limits,), or use the land on the north side of our house. Because we are surrounded by woodlands, I had a few serious challenges to overcome. I felled a few choice trees in order to allow more sun, cleared massive amounts of brush, and set about removing decades worth of root systems from the ground. The soil, though tightly packed and infested with roots, is also essentially a thick mass of leaf compost, a great starting point for growing.

After clearing out a major portion of our side yard I chose a plot that was roughly 20 x 12 for the main garden, fenced it in, and amended the soil with compost. It's recommended to have your soil tested for ph and nutrient levels, which I declined to do. Considering there are no rules when it comes to creating your own garden, I figured that if things grew, great, and if not I could regroup and move forward from there.

With a central garden delineated I stepped back to consider what I wanted to do with the rest of the land I had cleared. I knew there were a couple of plants that I wanted to grow outside of the actual garden, so I planned smaller beds for each. Because any potatoes not harvested may grow the following year, and because I knew I would be rotating crops in the future, I didn't want to deal with the potential problem of undiscovered potatoes coming up where next years chard or cucumbers might lie, so I gave them a space all their own outside of the garden proper. And because I had several crops in mind that would vine or grow very tall, I chose to plant my peas and beans in a separate bed as well. In retrospect I probably should have put them in the garden, not only for their nitrogen fixating abilities, but also because I quickly lost all of my pea plants to an aggressive brigade of rabbits.

I next outlined two areas for flower beds and one area for a landscape experiment. I planted wildflowers atop the grave of an old family dog, and added a second bed next door for flowers and herbs to intermingle. In the third area I attempted my piece de resistance- a table and stools entirely covered in grass. Check out the picture below for an example of what I mean. And last, because I knew getting enough light was my biggest challenge I decided I would also do some container gardening. I went to my local nursery and got a good deal on the cheap plastic pots that trees and shrubs come in, chose areas throughout the property that receive the most light, and by the end of summer I had as many tomato and cucumber plants in pots as I did in the ground.

That is basically the beginning of a story of the seasons. If you've read this far, hopefully you realize how much work can go into making your vision a reality. Last year I bit off a lot and then had to chew chew chew in order to make it all happen. We had an unseasonably cold and wet northeast summer; there was blight, mildew, and an army of rabbits and insects waiting to dine on my harvests. In the end the blood, sweat and sunburns are well worth it, whether you end up with one measly cucumber or too many to harvest. That measly cucumber, though a salad it does not make, is still going to taste damn good!