2018 Garden Plans

[baymule]

I'm wanting to plant greens for this fall/winter myself, plus a few other things.

Plant collard greens, some might go to seed, but most will live through the summer and keep producing for several years. Plant them in a place where you will want them to be for the next 3 to 5 years. I pick collards for us and break off the lower leaves for the chickens. Last fall I let the sheep in the garden to eat the weeds. They ate all the weeds, then they ate the collards. Interesting to note that the collards were their last choice. The collards sprouted back out and are still producing.

I had collards at our old house in Livingston that lived 5 years, grew tall, fell over, coiled around and just kept producing. Yay for collards!

 

[henless]

How's your garden goind Bee? I know you planned on using hay this year instead of wood chips. You were also going to put in some straw bales. How are they doing? I hope it's doing good for you. I so enjoy reading about your gardening. I always seem to learn something from you every year.

 

[Zeedman]

Going into surgery in a few days, so hadn't planned to put in much of a garden this year... but the weather cooperated, so I was able to plant at least the plots around my home. Counting my blessings in that regard, its been years here since it was warm & dry enough to plant everything in May. Wife & daughter helped plant, so with me marking rows & them following we got it all done in one day. Plenty of snap beans (Emerite and Bosnian Pole), scarlet runners, bush limas, yardlong beans, and two edamame soybean varieties. Okra, white eggplant (Gretel), and white bitter melon. Tomatoes Brandywine, Grape, and Roma. Swiss chard and water spinach for greens. Zucchini will go in later, after the SVB egg laying cycle has passed (about July 4th), hopefully I'll be somewhat ambulatory by then. Ground cherries are volunteering everywhere, I'll let a few grow where they will be out of the way.

Quite a few peppers, both sweet & hot... more than I really should have planted in limited space, but I didn't have the heart to throw them out. Bacskia, Elephant Ear, and Greygo are sweets. The hot peppers are Purple Jalapeno, PI 315008 (a short DTM habanero type), Pizza, Pizza sport (a breeding project), Red Chile, and Thai Giant.

No room for sweet corn or tromboncino, but fortunately we froze enough last year to almost make it through this year.

My rural plot (the main garden, 100' X 100') will be fallow this year, won't be able to do anything to it until I recover from surgery some time in July. There is a silver lining to that, though... I will be able to focus on eradicating the weeds brought in by last year's hay. The "organic" hay (25 bales of it, used as mulch) turned out to be full of ragweed, crab grass, and creeping jenny seed. It would have been a nearly insurmountable battle to garden in the face of that weed pressure, so this fallow year is well timed.

I'll also take advantage of the fallow year to bring in enough sand & soil to raise up the lower portions of the rural garden, increase its drainage, and build berms to divert the runoff from the adjacent field. Drainage from that field about 5 years back washed out much of the soil from the lower 1/3 of the garden, its basically been a wetland since. Hopefully next years rural garden will be far less problematic, and return to its former productivity.

 

[HmooseK]

@Zeedman

Take care Buddy!

If I may ask, what type surgery?

 

[flowerbug]

@Zeedman ,

i hope the surgery and recovery go well! listen to the doctors and ramp back up gradually. i'm glad something got planted, even if it all can't be kept up at least some produce can come of it before surrender... we've learned that certain squash does fine even with some weeds. you're lucky to have helpers...

i'm familiar with berms and having to deal with flooding. i wish they had brought it enough fill to start with to avoid all that work i had to do later. as it is we are an island when the weather gets extra wet. already a large part of some areas has been washed away and at some point we or someone else will have to deal with the NE corner which is going away. the power pole that is there may need to be shored up, etc...