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This week last year

09 lessons – All beans are not created equal

When looking for beans to plant this year, I was late to the party and had no idea what I wanted. Honestly, I think this led to a large portion of the mistakes this year, but learning from success unusual, so I’m counting this as a teaching year. Sounds better that way.
My main criteria when [...]

Like a butterfly flapping its wings

Building out this garden has had a very interested set of unintended consequences. Fortunately, they’ve almost all been good. But I would have never guessed at their diversity or breadth.
The first big one was fencing the yard. While an big expense, we planned for it and managed to get everything done in one long weekend [...]

09 lessons – How to fail at tomatoes

The biggest lesson this year was around tomatos. I did so many things wrong, it’s almost impossible to count them. Nearly every step along the way, I made a mistake. Most were recoverable, but it meant that we ended up with a crop of about a dozen tomatos from 16 plants. This is a miserable [...]

Prepping for winter

Autumn is in full swing here – the winds have picked up and its pouring down cold rain every day. That means that I’m starting to work on putting the garden to bed for the winter. It’s easy to pull the dead plants, but harder to gauge how long some of the others will last. [...]

Green monstrosities

We’ve been picking peas and beans off the same plants in small quantities, just enough for a meal, all summer. We’ve had arugula and some chard pop up and been completely disappointed by the New Zealand spinach. It looks way too much like the nightshade we grow to risk harvesting any.
The joy of the garden [...]

Of beans and greens

Last month I was finally able to get out into the yard and do some actual plant. After dispersing the 15 yards of topsoi and waiting for it to stop raining long enough to avoid walking in muddy glop, I hoed in 15 rows for planting. Each of these rows are 2 feet apart and [...]

First signs

Back on April 5th, I went insane with the warmth and sun and dragged my husband off to the nursery. We did some looking at the apple trees and currants and decided that we didn’t have enough information to commit to species yet.
But I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving empty handed. I grabbed 6 [...]

Preparing the ground

The fence is finally in. We hired people to come in and build the fence after it took us 3 months to dig 8 holes last year. The problem with living on the base of a mountain is that mountains are made of rock. Which then rolls downhill, making the yard one big rock pile. [...]

Growing my own

Phase Zero of the Great Gardening Project of 2009 has started.
My husband and I have decided that we should be growing some of our own food. Our decision to do this was motivated more by our desire to eat things grown closer to home, and it just doesn’t get much closer than in [...]