By Elk Herder, on November 11th, 2009
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 [...]
By Elk Herder, on November 10th, 2009
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 [...]
By Elk Herder, on November 9th, 2009
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 [...]
By Elk Herder, on November 6th, 2009
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. [...]
By Elk Herder, on September 22nd, 2009
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 [...]
By Elk Herder, on June 10th, 2009
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 [...]
By Elk Herder, on April 21st, 2009
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 [...]
By Elk Herder, on March 24th, 2009
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. [...]
By Elk Herder, on March 3rd, 2009
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 [...]
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